Differential gene expression and phenotypic plasticity in behavioural castes of the primitively eusocial wasp,Polistes canadensis (original) (raw)

Understanding how a single genome can produce a variety of different phenotypes is of fundamental importance in evolutionary and developmental biology. One of the most striking examples of phenotypic plasticity is the female caste system found in eusocial insects, where variation in reproductive (queens) and non-reproductive (workers) phenotypes results in a broad spectrum of caste types, ranging from behavioural through to morphological castes. Recent advances in genomic techniques allow novel comparisons on the nature of caste phenotypes to be made at the level of the genes in organisms for which there is little genome information, facilitating new approaches in studying social evolution and behaviour. Using the paper waspPolistes canadensisas a model system, we investigated for the first time how behavioural castes in primitively eusocial insect societies are associated with differential expression of shared genes. We found that queens and newly emerged females express gene expre...