Department of Genetics, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC 27695, USA.
Insect Mol Biol. 2010 Apr;19(2):153-62. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2583.2009.00965.x. Epub 2009 Dec 11.
Mating is fundamental to most organisms, although the physiological and transcriptional changes associated with this process have been largely characterized only in Drosophila melanogaster. In this study, we use honey bees as a model system because their queens undergo massive and permanent physiological and behavioural changes following mating. Previous studies have identified changes associated with the transition from a virgin queen to a fully mated, egg-laying queen. Here, we further uncouple the mating process to examine the effects of natural mating vs. instrumental insemination and saline vs. semen insemination. We observed effects on flight behaviour, vitellogenin expression and significant overlap in transcriptional profiles between our study and analogous studies in D. melanogaster, suggesting that some post-mating mechanisms are conserved across insect orders.
交配对大多数生物来说是至关重要的，尽管与这一过程相关的生理和转录变化在很大程度上仅在黑腹果蝇中得到了描述。在这项研究中，我们使用蜜蜂作为模型系统，因为它们的蜂王在交配后会经历巨大和永久的生理和行为变化。先前的研究已经确定了与从处女蜂王到完全交配、产卵蜂王的转变相关的变化。在这里，我们进一步分离交配过程，以研究自然交配与仪器授精、盐水与精液授精的影响。我们观察到了对飞行行为、卵黄原蛋白表达的影响，并且我们的研究与黑腹果蝇中的类似研究在转录谱上有显著的重叠，这表明一些交配后机制在昆虫目中是保守的。
