Differential transcriptome profiles of heads from foragers: Comparison between Apis mellifera ligustica and Apis cerana cerana

Given the differences in ecology and biology between Apis cerana cerana and Apis mellifera ligustica, we first used the Illumina-Solexa deep sequencing technology to describe the differences in the heads of A. cerana cerana and A. mellifera ligustica foragers at the gene expression level. We obtained over 3.6 million clean tags per sample and found about 2,370 differentially expressed genes related to metabolism, development, and signal transduction between A. cerana cerana and A. mellifera ligustica. Also, the many antisense transcripts found in our study indicated that they may represent novel paths involving gene expression regulation in honeybees. Our results indicated that differences in head expression profiles relate to sets of genes, and there existed significant enrichment of 22 pathways in differentially expressed genes. We conclude that the deep sequencing method provides us a better insight into differences at the molecular level between species within the genus Apis.