Polyrhachis vicina Transcriptome or Gene expression

P. vicina, as a typical eusocial insect, has the following characteristics: social division of labor, cooperative brood care, and generation overlap. P. vicina as a complete metamorphosis insect includes four stages: egg, larvae, pupa and adult. Adult P. vicina can be divided into three castes: female, male and worker. Recent studies showed that genetic factors influence the caste determination of social insects, but a whole-genome sequence of P. vicina has not yet been obtained. Until now, de novo transcriptome sequencing has been utilized in many non-model organisms. In the present study, we used RNA-Seq to identify caste-specific genes by building transcriptomes of mated P. vicina females and males as well as P. vicina workers. We identified differentially expressed genes in female, male and worker ants by comparative transcriptome analysis. We also screened PvEcR and PvUSP, the heat shock protein 90 family and heat shock protein 70 family homologs in P. vicina ants. Four PvHsp90 unigenes and 18 PvHsp70 unigenes were identified from the transcriptome of P. vicina, and their mRNA expression levels were examined using a tag-based digital gene expression (DGE) technique. Moreover, 2 significantly differentially expressed PvHsp90 unigenes and 8 significantly differentially expressed PvHsp70 unigenes in female, male and worker ants were tested for transcriptome data validation by real-time quantitative PCR. Our data provide a comprehensive resource for exploring the molecular mechanism of social insect caste development, differentiation, and specificity formation and establish an essential genomic resource for further studies in this ant.