454 Life Sciences, a Roche company, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign today announced that they have uncovered genetic underpinnings to social behavior in wasps. Using the company’s Genome Sequencer™ system, the researchers examined messenger RNA from the brains of wasps and correlated different expression patterns to different social behaviors. The study, entitled "Wasp brain gene expression supports an evolutionary link between maternal behavior and eusociality," appears online (ahead of print) today in the journal Science.
The presence of workers that forgo reproduction and care for their siblings is a defining feature of eusociality and a major challenge for evolutionary theory. It has been proposed that worker behavior evolved from maternal care behavior. The researchers explored this idea by studying gene expression (what genes are turned on and off and to what extent) in wasps. Gene expression in workers was more similar to foundresses, which show maternal care, than to queens and gynes, which do not. Insulin-related genes were among those genes showing a distinct pattern, suggesting that the evolution of eusociality involves major nutritional and reproductive pathways.
"Our goal was to tests the prediction that maternal and worker (eusocial) behavior share a common molecular basis" explained Gene Robinson, PhD., senior author and G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of the Neuroscience Program at the university of Illinois. "We used 454 Sequencing, together with the honey bee genome, to rapidly bring genomics to a model social organism, the wasp. This research is an early example of the utility of 454 sequencing for transcriptomics."
"The Genome Sequencer generates hundreds of thousands of long, highly-accurate reads in a single run, giving researchers unprecedented detail and accuracy for transcriptome profiling and gene expression applications," explained Michael Egholm, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development at 454 Life Sciences. "These and other applications enabled by 454 Sequencing are opening the door on social genomics. We are going to learn about how social behavior is coded in the genome and how it has evolved, which could have a lot of relevance to understanding human behavior."
454 Life Sciences develops and commercializes novel instrumentation for high-throughput DNA sequencing. Specific applications include whole-genome sequencing, RNA analysis and ultra-deep sequencing of target genes. The hallmarks of 454 Sequencing™ are its simple, unbiased sample preparation and massively parallel sequencing, which makes large-scale scientific projects feasible and more affordable. During the last months, the technology proved its suitability in a lot of application examples, in cancer research, infectious diseases research, drug discovery, marine biology, anthropology, paleontology, and many more.
For additional information, please visit http://www.454.com.
The presence of workers that forgo reproduction and care for their siblings is a defining feature of eusociality and a major challenge for evolutionary theory. It has been proposed that worker behavior evolved from maternal care behavior. The researchers explored this idea by studying gene expression (what genes are turned on and off and to what extent) in wasps. Gene expression in workers was more similar to foundresses, which show maternal care, than to queens and gynes, which do not. Insulin-related genes were among those genes showing a distinct pattern, suggesting that the evolution of eusociality involves major nutritional and reproductive pathways.
"Our goal was to tests the prediction that maternal and worker (eusocial) behavior share a common molecular basis" explained Gene Robinson, PhD., senior author and G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology and Director of the Neuroscience Program at the university of Illinois. "We used 454 Sequencing, together with the honey bee genome, to rapidly bring genomics to a model social organism, the wasp. This research is an early example of the utility of 454 sequencing for transcriptomics."
"The Genome Sequencer generates hundreds of thousands of long, highly-accurate reads in a single run, giving researchers unprecedented detail and accuracy for transcriptome profiling and gene expression applications," explained Michael Egholm, Ph.D., Vice President of Research and Development at 454 Life Sciences. "These and other applications enabled by 454 Sequencing are opening the door on social genomics. We are going to learn about how social behavior is coded in the genome and how it has evolved, which could have a lot of relevance to understanding human behavior."
454 Life Sciences develops and commercializes novel instrumentation for high-throughput DNA sequencing. Specific applications include whole-genome sequencing, RNA analysis and ultra-deep sequencing of target genes. The hallmarks of 454 Sequencing™ are its simple, unbiased sample preparation and massively parallel sequencing, which makes large-scale scientific projects feasible and more affordable. During the last months, the technology proved its suitability in a lot of application examples, in cancer research, infectious diseases research, drug discovery, marine biology, anthropology, paleontology, and many more.
For additional information, please visit http://www.454.com.
