Gene Regulatory Context of Honey Bee Worker Sterility
Abstract
Honey bee workers deactivate their ovaries and are functionally sterile when a queen is present in the colony. I adopt a bioinformatics approach to up-date a model transcriptional regulatory network (TRN) to study gene-regulatory processes that regulate fecundity in workers. On splitting the network, I obtained nine clusters and each cluster conformed to properties associated with real-world networks. Two of the nine clusters are enriched for 'sterility genes' and contained single well-connected hub genes (GB44769, ftz-f1). The genes in the two clusters were functionally enriched for nucleic acid binding (GO:0003676) and nucleotide binding (GO:0000166). I identified homologous genes for my two clusters of interest and constructed corresponding gene regulatory networks for D. melanogaster. In these clusters, I found genes enriched for properties like embryo development in D. melanogaster such as arm, kay and r-l whose homologues in A. mellifera could be tested for their role in honey bee reproduction.