title: Conservation in Mammals of Genes Associated with Aggression-Related Behavioral Phenotypes in Honey Bees.
abstract: The emerging field of sociogenomics explores the relations between social behavior and genome structure and function. An important question is the extent to which associations between social behavior and gene expression are conserved among the Metazoa. Prior experimental work in an invertebrate model of social behavior, the honey bee, revealed distinct brain gene expression patterns in African and European honey bees, and within European honey bees with different behavioral phenotypes. The present work is a computational study of these previous findings in which we analyze, by orthology determination, the extent to which genes that are socially regulated in honey bees are conserved across the Metazoa. We found that the differentially expressed gene sets associated with alarm pheromone response, the difference between old and young bees, and the colony influence on soldier bees, are enriched in widely conserved genes, indicating that these differences have genomic bases shared with many other metazoans. By contrast, the sets of differentially expressed genes associated with the differences between African and European forager and guard bees are depleted in widely conserved genes, indicating that the genomic basis for this social behavior is relatively specific to honey bees. For the alarm pheromone response gene set, we found a particularly high degree of conservation with mammals, even though the alarm pheromone itself is bee-specific. Gene Ontology identification of human orthologs to the strongly conserved honey bee genes associated with the alarm pheromone response shows overrepresentation of protein metabolism, regulation of protein complex formation, and protein folding, perhaps associated with remodeling of critical neural circuits in response to alarm pheromone. We hypothesize that such remodeling may be an adaptation of social animals to process and respond appropriately to the complex patterns of conspecific communication essential for social organization.
authors.affiliation: Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.
authors.forename: Hui
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-6902-2713
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Department of Entomology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Neuroscience Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.
authors.forename: Gene E
authors.initials: GE
authors.lastname: Robinson
authors.affiliation: Center for Biophysics and Computational Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Neuroscience Program, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.|Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, United States of America.
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jakobsson
mesh_terms: D000374:Aggression / Q000502:physiology*; D000818:Animals; D001516:Bees / Q000502:physiology*; D001522:Behavior, Animal / Q000502:physiology*; D005075:Biological Evolution; D017124:Conserved Sequence / Q000235:genetics; D005786:Gene Expression Regulation / Q000235:genetics; D056726:Genetic Association Studies / Q000379:methods; D006801:Humans; D008322:Mammals; D010641:Phenotype; D020543:Proteome / Q000235:genetics*; D012919:Social Behavior
chemical_list: D020543:Proteome