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The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe

BACKGROUND: Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the most geographically widespread insect orders in the world, and its species play important and diverse ecological and applied roles. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges to biodiversity this century, and lepidopterans are vulner...

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Autores principales: Lee, Ivy H. T., Nong, Wenyan, So, Wai Lok, Cheung, Chris K. H., Xie, Yichun, Baril, Toby, Yip, Ho Yin, Swale, Thomas, Chan, Simon K. F., Wei, Yingying, Lo, Nathan, Hayward, Alexander, Chan, Ting Fung, Lam, Hon-ming, Hui, Jerome H. L.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: BioMed Central 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10521528/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37749565
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-023-01703-1
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author Lee, Ivy H. T.
Nong, Wenyan
So, Wai Lok
Cheung, Chris K. H.
Xie, Yichun
Baril, Toby
Yip, Ho Yin
Swale, Thomas
Chan, Simon K. F.
Wei, Yingying
Lo, Nathan
Hayward, Alexander
Chan, Ting Fung
Lam, Hon-ming
Hui, Jerome H. L.
author_facet Lee, Ivy H. T.
Nong, Wenyan
So, Wai Lok
Cheung, Chris K. H.
Xie, Yichun
Baril, Toby
Yip, Ho Yin
Swale, Thomas
Chan, Simon K. F.
Wei, Yingying
Lo, Nathan
Hayward, Alexander
Chan, Ting Fung
Lam, Hon-ming
Hui, Jerome H. L.
author_sort Lee, Ivy H. T.
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the most geographically widespread insect orders in the world, and its species play important and diverse ecological and applied roles. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges to biodiversity this century, and lepidopterans are vulnerable to climate change. Temperature-dependent gene expression differences are of relevance under the ongoing climate crisis. However, little is known about how climate affects gene expression in lepidopterans and the ecological consequences of this, particularly with respect to genes with biased expression in one of the sexes. The common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe (Family Pieridae), is one of the most geographically widespread lepidopterans that can be found in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Nevertheless, what temperature-dependent effects there may be and whether the effects differ between the sexes remain largely unexplored. RESULTS: Here, we generated high-quality genomic resources for E. hecabe along with transcriptomes from eight developmental stages. Male and female butterflies were subjected to varying temperatures to assess sex-specific gene expression responses through mRNA and microRNA transcriptomics. We find that there are more temperature-dependent sex-biased genes in females than males, including genes that are involved in a range of biologically important functions, highlighting potential ecological impacts of increased temperatures. Further, by considering available butterfly data on sex-biased gene expression in a comparative genomic framework, we find that the pattern of sex-biased gene expression identified in E. hecabe is highly species-specific, rather than conserved across butterfly species, suggesting that sex-biased gene expression responses to climate change are complex in butterflies. CONCLUSIONS: Our study lays the foundation for further understanding of differential responses to environmental stress in a widespread lepidopteran model and demonstrates the potential complexity of sex-specific responses of lepidopterans to climate change. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12915-023-01703-1.
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spelling pubmed-105215282023-09-27 The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe Lee, Ivy H. T. Nong, Wenyan So, Wai Lok Cheung, Chris K. H. Xie, Yichun Baril, Toby Yip, Ho Yin Swale, Thomas Chan, Simon K. F. Wei, Yingying Lo, Nathan Hayward, Alexander Chan, Ting Fung Lam, Hon-ming Hui, Jerome H. L. BMC Biol Research Article BACKGROUND: Lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) is one of the most geographically widespread insect orders in the world, and its species play important and diverse ecological and applied roles. Climate change is one of the biggest challenges to biodiversity this century, and lepidopterans are vulnerable to climate change. Temperature-dependent gene expression differences are of relevance under the ongoing climate crisis. However, little is known about how climate affects gene expression in lepidopterans and the ecological consequences of this, particularly with respect to genes with biased expression in one of the sexes. The common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe (Family Pieridae), is one of the most geographically widespread lepidopterans that can be found in Asia, Africa, and Australia. Nevertheless, what temperature-dependent effects there may be and whether the effects differ between the sexes remain largely unexplored. RESULTS: Here, we generated high-quality genomic resources for E. hecabe along with transcriptomes from eight developmental stages. Male and female butterflies were subjected to varying temperatures to assess sex-specific gene expression responses through mRNA and microRNA transcriptomics. We find that there are more temperature-dependent sex-biased genes in females than males, including genes that are involved in a range of biologically important functions, highlighting potential ecological impacts of increased temperatures. Further, by considering available butterfly data on sex-biased gene expression in a comparative genomic framework, we find that the pattern of sex-biased gene expression identified in E. hecabe is highly species-specific, rather than conserved across butterfly species, suggesting that sex-biased gene expression responses to climate change are complex in butterflies. CONCLUSIONS: Our study lays the foundation for further understanding of differential responses to environmental stress in a widespread lepidopteran model and demonstrates the potential complexity of sex-specific responses of lepidopterans to climate change. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12915-023-01703-1. BioMed Central 2023-09-25 /pmc/articles/PMC10521528/ /pubmed/37749565 http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-023-01703-1 Text en © The Author(s) 2023 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) . The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) ) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.
spellingShingle Research Article
Lee, Ivy H. T.
Nong, Wenyan
So, Wai Lok
Cheung, Chris K. H.
Xie, Yichun
Baril, Toby
Yip, Ho Yin
Swale, Thomas
Chan, Simon K. F.
Wei, Yingying
Lo, Nathan
Hayward, Alexander
Chan, Ting Fung
Lam, Hon-ming
Hui, Jerome H. L.
The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title_full The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title_fullStr The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title_full_unstemmed The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title_short The genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, Eurema hecabe
title_sort genome and sex-dependent responses to temperature in the common yellow butterfly, eurema hecabe
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10521528/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37749565
http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/s12915-023-01703-1
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