Life stage and the environment as effectors of transposable element activity in two bee species

[Display omitted] •Diapause is a stress resistant physiological state, does it affect transposable element activity?•Diapause stage, heat stress, life stage, and environment affect transposable element activity.•Bias towards upregulation during diapause and larger fold expression changes during diap...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of insect physiology 2022-02, Vol.137, p.104361-104361, Article 104361
Main Authors: Signor, Sarah, Yocum, George, Bowsher, Julia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Animals
Bees - genetics
Diapause
DNA Transposable Elements
Humans
Megachile
Osmia
Stress
Stress, Physiological
Temperature
Transposable elements
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Summary:[Display omitted] •Diapause is a stress resistant physiological state, does it affect transposable element activity?•Diapause stage, heat stress, life stage, and environment affect transposable element activity.•Bias towards upregulation during diapause and larger fold expression changes during diapause.•Transposable element activity is not directly related to physiology, i.e. general down regulation.•The exact chromatin landscape may be the most important determinant of activity. Diapause is a complex physiological phenomenon that allows insects to weather stressful environmental conditions. The regulation of diapause is accordingly complex, including signaling pathways that involve both small RNA and mRNA and affect the cell cycle, stress resistance, and developmental timing. Transposable elements, mobile genetic elements that replicate within the genome, are also thought to be stress responsive and regulated by the small RNA pathway. Therefore, we asked what the relationship was between environmental stress, diapause status, and transposable element expression in two species of agriculturally important bees, Megachile rotundata and Osmia lignaria. We characterized the TE content of the genomes of both species, then evaluated the expression of TE families during temperature stress, general environmental stress, and diapause stage. We found that the genomic TE content of the two species was very different, and M. rotundata has a larger number of annotated TEs compared to O. lignaria. We also found that both diapause stage and temperature stress had large effects on TE expression. The fold change of TE famlies tended to be larger in those expressed during diapause, however there was only a small majority that were upregulated during diapause. This suggests that stress and diapause do not break down to a simple up-regulation or down-regulation of TEs, but rather that the TE family, the genomic position of its insertions, and the exact heterochromatin formation of the organism at any given environmental state or life stage may affect overall expression of TEs.
ISSN:0022-1910
1879-1611
DOI:10.1016/j.jinsphys.2022.104361