Full-Length Transcriptome Profile of Apis cerana Revealed by Nanopore Sequencing

• Published in: International journal of molecular sciences Vol. 25; no. 19; p. 10833
• Main Authors: Hu, Xiao-Fen, Jin, Meng-Jie, Gong, Zhi-Xian, Lin, Zong-Liang, Zhang, Li-Zhen, Zeng, Zhi-Jiang, Wang, Zi-Long
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Switzerland MDPI AG 09.10.2024; MDPI
• Subjects: Alternative Splicing; Animals; Apis cerana; Bees; Bees - genetics; differentially expressed transcripts; DNA sequencing; Female; full-length transcriptome; Gene Expression Profiling - methods; Genes; Genomes; Genomics; Honey; Honeybee; Male; Microsatellite Repeats - genetics; Molecular Sequence Annotation; nanopore sequencing; Nanopore Sequencing - methods; Nucleotide sequencing; Ovaries; Polyadenylation - genetics; Polymers; Proteins; RNA, Long Noncoding - genetics; Sequence Analysis, RNA - methods; Technology; Testes; Transcriptome - genetics; Asia; China; differentially expressed transcripts; nanopore sequencing; alternative splicing; full-length transcriptome; Apis cerana
• DOI: 10.3390/ijms251910833
• ISSN: 1422-0067; 1661-6596

The Asian honey bee ( ) plays a crucial role in providing abundant bee products and in maintaining ecological balance. Despite the availability of the genomic sequence of the Asian honey bee, its transcriptomic information remains largely incomplete. To address this issue, here we constructed three pooled RNA samples from the queen, drone, and worker bees of and performed full-length RNA sequencing using Nanopore single-molecule sequencing technology. Ultimately, we obtained 160,811 full-length transcript sequences from 19,859 genes, with 141,189 being novel transcripts, of which 130,367 were functionally annotated. We detected 520, 324, and 1823 specifically expressed transcripts in the queen, worker, and drone bees, respectively. Furthermore, we identified 38,799 alternative splicing (AS) events from 5710 genes, 44,243 alternative polyadenylation (APA) sites from 1649 gene loci, 88,187 simple sequence repeats (SSRs), and 17,387 long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs). Leveraging these transcripts as references, we identified 6672, 7795, and 6804 differentially expressed transcripts (DETs) in comparisons of queen ovaries vs drone testes, worker ovaries vs drone testes, and worker ovaries vs queen ovaries, respectively. Our research results provide a comprehensive set of reference transcript datasets for , offering important sequence information for further exploration of its gene functions.