Comparative Transcriptome Analysis of Queen, Worker, and Larva of Asian Honeybee, Apis cerana

The Asian honeybee, Apis cerana, is a native honeybee species in Korea which is important in agriculture for pollination and honey production. For better understanding of the physiology of A. cerana, high-throughput Illumina transcriptome sequencing was performed to analyze the gene expression profiles of queen, worker, and larva. A total of 219,799,682 clean reads corresponding to 22.2 Gb of nucleotide sequences was obtained from the whole body total RNA samples. The Apis mellifera reference mRNA sequence database was used to measure the gene expression level with Bowtie2 and eXpress software, and the Illumina short reads were then mapped to 11,459 out of 11,736 A. mellifera reference genes. Total of 9,221 genes with FPKM value greater than 5 of each sample group were subjected to eggNOG with BLASTX for gene ontology analysis. The differential gene expression between queen and worker, and worker and larva were analyzed to screen the overexpressed genes in each sample group. In the queen and worker sample group, total of 1,766 genes were differentially expressed with 887 and 879 genes overexpressed over two folds in queen and worker, respectively. In the worker and larva sample group, total of 1,410 genes were differentially expressed with 1,009 and 401 genes overexpressed over two folds in worker and larva, respectively.