Australian black field crickets show changes in neural gene expression associated with socially-induced morphological, life-history, and behavioral plasticity
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Animal Behavior, Developmental Biology, Evolutionary Studies, Genomics
- Keywords
- Developmental Plasticity, Gene Expression, Teleogryllus commodus, Black Field Cricket, Sex Differences
- Copyright
- © 2016 Kasumovic et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2016. Australian black field crickets show changes in neural gene expression associated with socially-induced morphological, life-history, and behavioral plasticity. PeerJ Preprints 4:e1941v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.1941v1
Abstract
Background: Ecological and evolutionary model organisms have provided extensive insight into the ecological triggers, adaptive benefits, and evolution of life-history driven developmental plasticity. Despite this, we still have a poor understanding of the underlying genetic changes that occur during shifts towards different developmental trajectories. The goal of this study is to determine whether we can identify underlying gene expression patterns that can describe the different life-history trajectories individuals follow in response to social cues of competition. To do this, we use the Australian black field cricket (Teleogryllus commodus), a species with sex-specific developmental trajectories moderated by the density and quality of calls heard during immaturity. In this study, we manipulated the social information males and females could hear by rearing individuals in either calling or silent treatments. We next used RNA-Seq to develop a reference transcriptome to study changes in brain gene expression at two points prior to sexual maturation. Results: We show accelerated development in both sexes when exposed to calling; changes were also seen in growth, lifespan, and reproductive effort. Functional relationships between genes and phenotypes were apparent from ontological enrichment analysis. We demonstrate that increased phenotypic expression was often associated with the expression of a greater number of genes with similar effect, thus providing a suite of candidate genes for future research in this and other invertebrate organisms. Conclusions: Our results provide interesting insight into the genomic underpinnings of developmental plasticity. We highlight the relationship between genes of known effect and behavioral and phenotypic traits that are under strong sexual selection in Teleogryllus commodus. We also demonstrate the variation in suites of genes associated with different developmental trajectories. Our results provide the opportunity for a genomic exploration of other evolutionary theories such as condition dependence and sexual conflict.
Author Comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints. This article is also in the process of being submitted to BMC Genomics.