Seminal fluid components alone stimulate post-mating changes in honey bee queens (Apis mellifera)
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PROVIDER: PRJNA607066 | ENA |
REPOSITORIES: ENA
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Project description:Honey bee queens undergo dramatic behavioral (e.g., reduced sexual receptivity), physiological (e.g., ovary activation, ovulation, and modulation of pheromone production) and molecular changes after they complete mating. To elucidate how queen post-mating changes are influenced by seminal fluid, a non-spermatozoa-containing component of semen, we injected queens with semen or seminal fluid alone. We assessed queen sexual receptivity, ovary development, worker retinue response (which is influenced by queen pheromone production), and transcriptional changes in queen abdominal fat body and brain tissues. Injection with either seminal fluid or semen resulted in decreased sexual receptivity, increased attractiveness of queens to workers, and altered expression of several genes that are also regulated in naturally mated queens. The post-mating and transcriptional changes of queens receiving seminal fluid were not significantly different from queens treated with seminal fluid, suggesting that components in seminal fluid, such as seminal fluid proteins, are largely responsible for stimulating post-mating changes in queens.
2020-07-27 | GSE145395 | GEO
Project description:Queens of social insects make all mate-choice decisions on a single day, except in honeybees whose queens can conduct mating flights for several days even when already inseminated by a number of drones. Honeybees therefore appear to have a unique, evolutionarily derived form of sexual conflict: a queen’s decision to pursue risky additional mating flights is driven by later-life fitness gains from genetically more diverse worker-offspring but reduces paternity shares of the drones she already mated with. We used artificial insemination, RNA-sequencing and electroretinography to show that seminal fluid induces a decline in queen vision by perturbing the phototransduction pathway within 24-48 hours. Follow up field trials revealed that queens receiving seminal fluid flew two days earlier than sister queens inseminated with saline, and failed more often to return. These findings are consistent with seminal fluid components manipulating queen eyesight to reduce queen promiscuity across mating flights.
2019-09-10 | GSE127185 | GEO
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC7371693 | biostudies-literature
Project description:Mating is a complex process, which is frequently associated with behavioural and physiological changes. However, understanding of the genetic underpinnings of these changes is limited. Honey bees are both a model system in behavioural genomics, and the dominant managed pollinator of human crops; consequently understanding the mating process has both pure and applied value. We used next-generation transcriptomics to probe changes in gene expression in the brains of honey bee queens, as they transition from virgin to mated reproductive status. In addition, we used CO2-narcosis, which induces oviposition without mating, as an experimental control for the mating process. Mating produced significant changes in the expression of vision, chemo-reception, metabolic, and immune-related genes. Differential expression of these genes maps clearly onto known behavioural and physiological changes that occur during the transition from being a virgin queen to a newly-mated queen. A subset of these changes in gene expression were also detected in CO2-treated queens, as predicted from previous physiological studies. In addition, we compared our results to previous studies that used microarray techniques across a range of experimental time-points. Changes in expression of immune- and vision-related genes were common to all studies, supporting an involvement of these groups of genes in the mating process. However, these comparisons also indicate the need to understand the temporal dynamics of gene expression across the entire mating and reproductive process.
2015-09-23 | GSE65833 | GEO
Project description:Mating is a complex process, which is frequently associated with behavioural and physiological changes. However, understanding of the genetic underpinnings of these changes is limited. Honey bees are both a model system in behavioural genomics, and the dominant managed pollinator of human crops; consequently understanding the mating process has both pure and applied value. We used next-generation transcriptomics to probe changes in gene expression in the brains of honey bee queens, as they transition from virgin to mated reproductive status. In addition, we used CO2-narcosis, which induces oviposition without mating, as an experimental control for the mating process. Mating produced significant changes in the expression of vision, chemo-reception, metabolic, and immune-related genes. Differential expression of these genes maps clearly onto known behavioural and physiological changes that occur during the transition from being a virgin queen to a newly-mated queen. A subset of these changes in gene expression were also detected in CO2-treated queens, as predicted from previous physiological studies. In addition, we compared our results to previous studies that used microarray techniques across a range of experimental time-points. Changes in expression of immune- and vision-related genes were common to all studies, supporting an involvement of these groups of genes in the mating process. However, these comparisons also indicate the need to understand the temporal dynamics of gene expression across the entire mating and reproductive process. Brain RNA samples for 3 treatments: control (N=4), mated (N=4) and treated with carbon dioxide (N=4)
2015-09-23 | E-GEOD-65833 | biostudies-arrayexpress
Project description:Mating causes dramatic changes in female insects at the behavioral, physiological, and molecular levels. The factors driving these changes (e.g., seminal proteins, seminal volume) and the molecular pathways by which these factors are operating have been characterized only in a handful of insect species. Here we use instrumental insemination of honey bee queens to examine the role of the insemination substance (saline vs. semen) and volume (1 vs. 8 uL) in triggering post-mating changes. We also examine differences in gene expression patterns in the fat bodies of queens that have high ovary activation to determine if events during copulation can cause long-term changes in gene expression. We found that the instrumental insemination procedure alone caused cessation of mating flights and triggered ovary activation, with insemination volume contributing to increased ovary activation. Hierarchical clustering grouped queens primarily by insemination substance and then insemination volume, suggesting that while volume may trigger short-term physiological changes, substance plays a greater role in regulating long-term transcriptional changes. There was considerable but not a complete overlap in the gene pathways regulated by these two factors. Comparisons with gene lists from previous studies on queen mating revealed that several of the same biological processes and pathways were regulated, but only one gene (defensin) was found to be regulated in all studies. Our results suggest that both insemination substance and volume trigger molecular post-mating changes by altering overlapping gene pathways involved in honey bee reproduction.
2013-05-21 | E-MEXP-3681 | biostudies-arrayexpress
Project description:Honey bee drones, queens and workers have vastly different phenotypes. Here we profile the the expression level of mRNAs and microRNAs of honeybee, drones, queens and workers at the L5 larval stage (91 hours +/- 1).
2015-09-06 | GSE61253 | GEO
Project description:Mating is a complex process that causes many behavioral and physiological changes, but the factors triggering these changes and the underlying molecular processes are not well characterized. Honey bee queens provide a convenient system for dissecting these factors (e.g., physical manipulation, insemination volume, insemination substance) via instrumental insemination. We examined the effects of carbon dioxide (CO2), a commonly used anesthetic in instrumental insemination that causes changes similar to those observed after mating, and physical manipulation, which presumably mimics the act of copulation, on the brain transcriptional changes in honey bee queens. We found significant gene overlap between our study and previous mating studies in honey bee queens and Drosophila. This suggests that molecular pathways regulating the mating process are conserved across different mating regimes of honey bees as well as across insect orders.
2011-01-30 | E-MEXP-2646 | biostudies-arrayexpress
Project description:Seminal fluid compromises visual perception in honeybee queens reducing their survival during additional mating flights
| PRJNA524311 | ENA
Project description: Not available
| S-EPMC7150968 | biostudies-literature