Aphis glycines Transcriptome or Gene expression

Environmental stress profoundly affects basic cellular functions, but whether important differences exist between variable forms of stress remains a mystery in many animals. The authors used aphids to test whether stressors causing equivalent mortality (heat, starvation, host plant defenses) produce similar changes in gene expression. Patterns of gene expression were highly variable and unique to each stressor. Starvation altered thousands of genes, heat changed several hundred, but plant defenses affected less than fifteen.