Dopamine mediates the pea aphid wing plasticity

Many organisms exhibit phenotypic plasticity, in which developmental processes result in different phenotypes depending on their environmental context. We focus on the molecular mechanisms underlying that environmental response. Pea aphids (Acyrthosiphon pisum) show a wing dimorphism, in which pea aphid mothers produce winged or wingless daughters when exposed to a crowded or low-density environment, respectively. We investigated the role of dopamine in mediating this wing plasticity, motivated by a previous study that found higher dopamine titers in wingless- versus winged-producing aphid mothers. In this study, we found that manipulating dopamine levels in aphid mothers affected the number of winged offspring they produced. Specifically, asexual female adults injected with a dopamine agonist produced a lower percentage of winged offspring, while asexual females injected with a dopamine antagonist produced a higher percentage of winged offspring, matching expectations based on the tite..., This data set comprises previously published and reanalyzed RNA-seq data and pharmaceutical injection result data.
In the RNAseq folder, the GenBank accession numbers for these sequences are SRR13238533 - SRR13238544, SRR2148902 - SRR2148909, and SRR21747201 - SRR21747212 (recorded in \"Sample Accession Number.xlsx). Raw reads were processed using TrimGalore and FastQC (see “process_read.sh”). We trimmed adaptor sequences, filtered out poor-quality sequences (quality score cutoff 20), and discarded sequences shorter than 20nt. The resulting reads were then mapped to the pea aphid genome v3.0 using HISAT2 (see “map_read_hisat_v3.0genome.sh”, “modified genome and annotation” folder). All raw counts matrix was combined and processed into an R.data (“5lines_counts.Rdata”). Counts normalization and differential expression analysis were done using the v3.0 genome annotation with R package DESeq2 (“DE_analysis.Rmd”, “modified genome and annotation” folder). Information for dopamine-related gene..., Please open .csv and .xlsx files using excel. Use Rstudio for the .Rmd and .Rdata files. Other files can be viewed using notepad or pdf viewer.