Genes involved in convergent evolution of eusociality in bees.

ABSTRACT: Eusociality has arisen independently at least 11 times in insects. Despite this convergence, there are striking differences among eusocial lifestyles, ranging from species living in small colonies with overt conflict over reproduction to species in which colonies contain hundreds of thousands of highly specialized sterile workers produced by one or a few queens. Although the evolution of eusociality has been intensively studied, the genetic changes involved in the evolution of eusociality are relatively unknown. We examined patterns of molecular evolution across three independent origins of eusociality by sequencing transcriptomes of nine socially diverse bee species and combining these data with genome sequence from the honey bee Apis mellifera to generate orthologous sequence alignments

SUBMITTER: Woodard SH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3088614 | biostudies-literature | 2011 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature