Apis mellifera brain Vg-miRNA data

In honey bees, Vitellogenin (Vg) is hypothesized to be a major factor affecting hormone signaling, food-related behavior, immunity, stress resistance and lifespan. Likewise microRNAs play important roles in posttranscriptional gene regulation and affect many biological processes thereby showing many parallels to Vg functions. The molecular basis of Vg and microRNA interactions is largely unknown. Here, we exploited the well-established RNA interference (RNAi) protocol for Vg knockdown to investigate its effects on microRNA population in honey bee forager’s brain and fat body tissue. To identify microRNAs that are differentially expressed between tissues in control and knockdown foragers, we used µParaflo® microfluidic oligonucleotide microRNA microarrays. Our results show 76 and 74 miRNAs were expressed in the brain of control and knockdown foragers whereas 66 and 69 miRNAs were expressed in the fat body of control and knockdown foragers respectively. Target prediction identified potential seed matches for differentially expressed subset of microRNAs affected by Vg knockdown. These candidate genes are involved in a broad range of biological processes including insulin signaling, juvenile hormone (JH) and ecdysteroid signaling previously shown to affect foraging behavior. Thus, here we demonstrate a causal link between Vg expression-variation and variation in the abundance of microRNAs in different tissues with possible consequences for regulation of foraging behavior. We knocked down Vitellogenin (Vg) gene expression (using RNAi) in adult workers to identify potential downstream consequences on the expression of microRNA population in the brain compared to control group (dsRNA-GFP injected bees). Six biological samples of brain-derived small RNA fraction were prepared for each treatment group (dsRNA-Vg and dsRNA-GFP). Each biological sample contained pooled RNA from 5 unique individuals. Each brain pool contained a total of 1 µg of small RNA fraction, to which each of the 5 individuals contributed equally (200 ng). Pools were named as “control forager brain” (GFBr) and “knockdown forager brain” (VFBr), followed by a number from 1 to 6.