Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Artigo Acesso aberto Produção Nacional Revisado por pares

BIBTEX RIS

Molecular signatures of plastic phenotypes in two eusocial insect species with simple societies

2015; National Academy of Sciences; Volume: 112; Issue: 45 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1073/pnas.1515937112

1091-6490

Solenn Patalano, Anna Vlasova, Christopher D. R. Wyatt, Philip Ewels, Francisco Câmara, Pedro G. Ferreira, Claire Asher, Tomasz P. Jurkowski, Anne Segonds-Pichon, Martin Bachman, Irene González-Navarrete, André E. Minoche, Felix Krueger, Ernesto Lowy, Marina Marcet‐Houben, Jose Luis Rodriguez-Ales, Fábio Santos do Nascimento, Shankar Balasubramanian, Toni Gabaldón, James E. Tarver, Simon Andrews, Heinz Himmelbauer, William O. H. Hughes, Roderic Guigó, Wolf Reik, Seirian Sumner,

Insect and Pesticide Research

Significance In eusocial insect societies, such as ants and some bees and wasps, phenotypes are highly plastic, generating alternative phenotypes (queens and workers) from the same genome. The greatest plasticity is found in simple insect societies, in which individuals can switch between phenotypes as adults. The genomic, transcriptional, and epigenetic underpinnings of such plasticity are largely unknown. In contrast to the complex societies of the honeybee, we find that simple insect societies lack distinct transcriptional differentiation between phenotypes and coherently patterned DNA methylomes. Instead, alternative phenotypes are largely defined by subtle transcriptional network organization. These traits may facilitate genomic plasticity. These insights and resources will stimulate new approaches and hypotheses that will help to unravel the genomic processes that create phenotypic plasticity.