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HomeArticlesAnalyses of major royal jelly protein gene cluster in 3 Apis species...

Analyses of major royal jelly protein gene cluster in 3 Apis species with long amplicon sequencing

The western honeybee, Apis mellifera is a prominent model organism in the field of sociogenomics and a recent upgrade substantially improved annotations of the reference genome. Nevertheless, genome assemblies based on short-sequencing reads suffer from problems in regions comprising e.g. multi-copy genes. We used single-molecule nanopore-based sequencing with extensive read-lengths to reconstruct the organization of the major royal jelly protein (mrjp) region in three species of the genus Apis. Long-amplicon sequencing provides evidence for lineage-specific evolutionary fates of Apis mrjps. Whereas the most basal species, A. florea, seems to encode ten mrjps, different patterns of gene loss and retention were observed for A. mellifera and A. dorsata. Furthermore, we show that a previously reported pseudogene in A. mellifera, mrjp2-like, is an assembly artefact arising from short read sequencing.

S Helbing, HMG Lattorff, RFA Moritz, A Buttstedt (2017): Comparative analyses of the major royal jelly protein gene cluster in three Apis species with long amplicon sequencing. DNA Research, early online (DOI: 10.1093/dnares/dsw064)

https://academic.oup.com/dnaresearch/article-abstract/2972857/Comparative-analyses-of-the-major-royal-jelly
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COLOSS Associationhttps://coloss.org/
COLOSS (Prevention of honey bee COlony LOSSes) is an international, non-profit association headquartered in Bern, Switzerland that is focussed on improving the well-being of bees at a global level. We are composed of scientific professionals that include researchers, veterinarians, agriculture extension specialists and students. We understand that cooperation and open dialogue are key to better understanding the reasons why bee populations are threatened in today’s world.