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RNA sequencing reveals differential thermal regulation mechanisms between sexes of Glanville fritillary butterfly in the Tianshan Mountains, China

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Abstract

The Glanville fritillary butterfly (Melitaea cinxia; Nymphalidae) has been extensively studied as a model species in metapopulation ecology. We investigated in the earlier studies that female butterflies exhibit higher thermal tolerance than males in the Tianshan Mountains of China. We aim to understand the molecular mechanism of differences of thermal responses between sexes. We used RNA-seq approach and performed de novo assembly of transcriptome to compare the gene expression patterns between two sexes after heat stress. All the reads were assembled into 84,376 transcripts and 72,701 unigenes. The number of differential expressed genes (DEGs) between control and heat shock samples was 175 and 268 for males and females, respectively. Heat shock proteins genes (hsps) were up-regulated in response to heat stress in both males and females. Most of the up-regulated hsps showed higher fold changes in males than in females. Females expressed more ribosomal subunit protein genes, transcriptional elongation factor genes, and methionine-rich storage protein genes, participating in protein synthesis. It indicated that protein synthesis is needed for females to replace the damaged proteins due to heat shock. In addition, aspartate decarboxylase might contribute to thermal tolerance in females. These differences in gene expression may at least partly explain the response to high temperature stress, and the fact that females exhibit higher thermal tolerance.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Grants 30470286, 30670332 and the China-Finland Collaboration Project 30211130505 from the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the project 6082012 supported by Beijing Natural Science Foundation. We thank BIOPIC for RNA-seq sequencing and Center of Bioinformatics of Peking University for providing the server. We also thank Fuchou Tang, Xiaomeng Liu, Yang Ding and Chao Zhang from Peking University, and Xin Zhou and Shanlin Liu from BGI, who provided technical support in the transcriptome analysis. In addition, we thank Yuping Meng, Zijuan Cao and Jianing Yang for butterfly rearing.

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  1. College of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing, 100871, People’s Republic of China

    Ying Lei, Yang Wang, Shiqi Luo, Chongren Xu & Rongjiang Wang

  2. Department of Biosciences, University of Helsinki, 00014, Helsinki, Finland

    Virpi Ahola

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  1. Ying Lei
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  2. Yang Wang
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Lei, Y., Wang, Y., Ahola, V. et al. RNA sequencing reveals differential thermal regulation mechanisms between sexes of Glanville fritillary butterfly in the Tianshan Mountains, China. Mol Biol Rep 43, 1423–1433 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-016-4076-x

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