The Honey Bee Epigenomes: Differential Methylation of Brain DNA in Queens and Workers (original) (raw)
Figure 4
Expression profile of an alternatively spliced and differentially methylated gene GB18602 in queen and worker brains.
(A) The CpG methylation pattern indicating the level of methylation for individual CpGs (blue squares, workers; red squares, queens). (B) Gene model of GB18602 showing the two spliced variants S (short protein) and L (long protein) and the positions of PCR primers used for variant-specific amplifications. The green and orange arrows indicate the positions of two alternative Stop codons. (C) Relative expression of the two spliced variants in brains of queens and workers examined by real-time PCR. The level of transcript S (green) encoding the truncated protein is significantly up-regulated in the queen brain, whereas the L variant (orange) is expressed at the same level in both castes. The queen expression represents a combined set of data from three independent queen samples: 4 mo old (1 brain), 12 mo old (2 brains), and swarm queens of unknown age (2 brains). Workers were 8 d old (6 brains in 3 replicates). The reference gene was calmodulin [2]. Whisker-box plot of expression ratio values: dotted line, median value; box, inter-quartile range of values; whiskers, outer 50% of observations. For more details, see Table S4.