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Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris)
Insects are at the dawn of an epigenetics era. Numerous social insect species have been found to possess a functioning methylation system, previously not thought to exist in insects. Methylation, an epigenetic tag, may be vital for the sociality and division of labour for which social insects are re...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
The Royal Society
2014
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24523266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2502 |
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author | Amarasinghe, Harindra E. Clayton, Crisenthiya I. Mallon, Eamonn B. |
author_facet | Amarasinghe, Harindra E. Clayton, Crisenthiya I. Mallon, Eamonn B. |
author_sort | Amarasinghe, Harindra E. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Insects are at the dawn of an epigenetics era. Numerous social insect species have been found to possess a functioning methylation system, previously not thought to exist in insects. Methylation, an epigenetic tag, may be vital for the sociality and division of labour for which social insects are renowned. In the bumble-bee Bombus terrestris, we found methylation differences between the genomes of queenless reproductive workers and queenless non-reproductive workers. In a follow up experiment, queenless workers whose genomes had experimentally altered methylation were more aggressive and more likely to develop ovaries compared with control queenless workers. This shows methylation is important in this highly plastic reproductive division of labour. Methylation is an epigenetic tag for genomic imprinting (GI). It is intriguing that the main theory to explain the evolution of GI predicts that GI should be important in this worker reproduction behaviour. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-4027386 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | The Royal Society |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-40273862014-05-28 Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) Amarasinghe, Harindra E. Clayton, Crisenthiya I. Mallon, Eamonn B. Proc Biol Sci Research Articles Insects are at the dawn of an epigenetics era. Numerous social insect species have been found to possess a functioning methylation system, previously not thought to exist in insects. Methylation, an epigenetic tag, may be vital for the sociality and division of labour for which social insects are renowned. In the bumble-bee Bombus terrestris, we found methylation differences between the genomes of queenless reproductive workers and queenless non-reproductive workers. In a follow up experiment, queenless workers whose genomes had experimentally altered methylation were more aggressive and more likely to develop ovaries compared with control queenless workers. This shows methylation is important in this highly plastic reproductive division of labour. Methylation is an epigenetic tag for genomic imprinting (GI). It is intriguing that the main theory to explain the evolution of GI predicts that GI should be important in this worker reproduction behaviour. The Royal Society 2014-04-07 /pmc/articles/PMC4027386/ /pubmed/24523266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2502 Text en http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ © 2014 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Research Articles Amarasinghe, Harindra E. Clayton, Crisenthiya I. Mallon, Eamonn B. Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title | Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title_full | Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title_fullStr | Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title_full_unstemmed | Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title_short | Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris) |
title_sort | methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (bombus terrestris) |
topic | Research Articles |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4027386/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24523266 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2013.2502 |
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