The nutritionally responsive transcriptome of the polyphenic beetle Onthophagus taurus and the importance of sexual dimorphism and body region
The nutritionally responsive transcriptome of the polyphenic beetle Onthophagus taurus and the importance of sexual dimorphism and body region
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DOI：
10.1098/rspb.2014.2084
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发表时间：
2014-12-22
影响因子：
4.7
通讯作者：
Moczek, Armin P.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Kijimoto, Teiya;Snell-Rood, Emilie C.;Moczek, Armin P.
对营养变化的发育反应是生态学上最重要的适应性可塑性类型之一。然而，营养反应基因表达的全基因组模式的知识是有限的。在这里，我们研究了全基因组转录反应的营养变化和依赖于性状和性别的甲虫Onthophagus taurus。我们发现，平均在转录组，营养有助于基因表达的整体变化比性别或身体部位，但对于一个温和的基因子集营养是迄今为止最重要的决定因素的表达变异。此外，我们的研究结果拒绝了这样的假设，即一个共同的机制可能是整个身体区域营养敏感性发展的基础。相反，我们发现，大小（测量的差异表达的重叠群的数量），组成（功能富集）和进化的后果（测量的序列变异模式）在很大程度上取决于到底是哪个身体区域被认为是和程度上观察到的形态学水平上的性二态性。更一般地说，我们的研究结果表明，营养偏向基因表达的发育机制和进化后果的研究必须考虑到基因表达的其他变异来源，如性别二型和性状类型的动态和复杂性。
Developmental responses to nutritional variation represent one of the ecologically most important classes of adaptive plasticity. However, knowledge of genome-wide patterns of nutrition-responsive gene expression is limited. Here, we studied genome-wide transcriptional responses to nutritional variation and their dependency on trait and sex in the beetle Onthophagus taurus. We find that averaged across the transcriptome, nutrition contributes less to overall variation in gene expression than do sex or body region, but that for a modest subset of genes nutrition is by far the most important determinant of expression variation. Furthermore, our results reject the hypothesis that a common machinery may underlie nutrition-sensitive development across body regions. Instead, we find that magnitude (measured by number of differentially expressed contigs), composition (measured by functional enrichment) and evolutionary consequences (measured by patterns of sequence variation) are heavily dependent on exactly which body region is considered and the degree of sexual dimorphism observed on a morphological level. More generally, our findings illustrate that studies into the developmental mechanisms and evolutionary consequences of nutrition-biased gene expression must take into account the dynamics and complexities imposed by other sources of variation in gene expression such as sexual dimorphism and trait type.