Apis mellifera Royal nurse honeybees'' head DGE project
We used gene expression analysis to examine whether queen rearing is performed by a specialized sub-caste of the nurse bees using a tag-based digital gene expression (DGE) method. From head gene expression profiles we obtained about 5.95 and 5.84 million clean tags from the nurses breeding queen larvae [NBQL] group and nurses breeding worker larvae [NBWL] group, respectively. And detected 673 differentially expressed genes between these two samples, with 387 genes up-regulated and 286 genes down-regulated in NBQL group compared to the NBWL group.