High-abundance mRNAs in Apis mellifera: comparison between nurses and foragers

A large volume of honey bee (Apis mellifera) tag-seq was obtained to identify differential gene expression via Solexa/lllumina Digital Gene Expression tag profiling (DGE) based on next generation sequencing. In total, 4,286,250 (foragers) and 3,422,327 (nurses) clean tags were sequenced, 24,568 (foragers) and 13,134 (nurses) distinct clean tags could not be match to the reference database, and 7508 and 6875 mapped genes were detected in foragers and nurses respectively. 7045 genes were found differentially expressed between foragers and nurses. Of those genes, 1621 genes had significantly different expression, that is, they showed an expression ratio (foragers/nurses) of more than 2 and FDR (False Discovery Rate) of less than 0.001. We identified 101 genes that were uniquely expressed in foragers, and 9 genes that were only expressed in nurses. We performed the Gene Ontology (GO) category and Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway enrichment analysis, and found 415 genes with annotation terms linked to the GO cellular component category. 200 components of KEGG pathways were obtained, including 21 signaling pathways. The PPAR signaling pathway was the most highly enriched, with the lowest Q-value.