Comparative analyses of the major royal jelly protein gene cluster in three Apis species with long amplicon sequencing.
The western honeybee, Apis mellifera is a prominent model organism in the field of sociogenomics and a recent upgrade substantially improved annotations of the reference genome. Nevertheless, genome assemblies based on short-sequencing reads suffer from problems in regions comprising e.g. multi-copy genes. We used single-molecule nanopore-based sequencing with extensive read-lengths to reconstruct the organization of the major royal jelly protein (mrjp) region in three species of the genus Apis. Long-amplicon sequencing provides evidence for lineage-specific evolutionary fates of Apis mrjps. Whereas the most basal species, A. florea, seems to encode ten mrjps, different patterns of gene loss and retention were observed for A. mellifera and A. dorsata. Furthermore, we show that a previously reported pseudogene in A. mellifera, mrjp2-like, is an assembly artefact arising from short read sequencing.
Institut für Biologie, Molekulare Ökologie, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany.
Sophie
S
Helbing
Institut für Biologie, Molekulare Ökologie, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany.|German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.
H Michael G
HMG
Lattorff
Institut für Biologie, Molekulare Ökologie, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany.|German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany.|Department of Zoology and Entomology, University of Pretoria,Pretoria, South Africa.
Robin F A
RFA
Moritz
Institut für Biologie, Molekulare Ökologie, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Halle (Saale), Germany.
Anja
A
Buttstedt
D000818:Animals; D001516:Bees / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism*; D019143:Evolution, Molecular; D005227:Fatty Acids / Q000235:genetics*; D005260:Female; D023281:Genomics; D005810:Multigene Family; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D000099219:Royal Jelly
D005227:Fatty Acids; D000099219:Royal Jelly
Apis dorsata; Apis florea; Apis mellifera; MinION™; gene duplication