Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801.
Department of Statistics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 Sep 5;114(36):9653-9658. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1708127114. Epub 2017 Jul 31.
E. O. Wilson proposed in that similarities between human and animal societies reflect common mechanistic and evolutionary roots. When introduced in 1975, this controversial hypothesis was beyond science's ability to test. We used genomic analyses to determine whether superficial behavioral similarities in humans and the highly social honey bee reflect common molecular mechanisms. Here, we report that gene expression signatures for individual bees unresponsive to various salient social stimuli are significantly enriched for autism spectrum disorder-related genes. These signatures occur in the mushroom bodies, a high-level integration center of the insect brain. Furthermore, our finding of enrichment was unique to autism spectrum disorders; brain gene expression signatures from other honey bee behaviors do not show this enrichment, nor do datasets from other human behavioral and health conditions. These results demonstrate deep conservation for genes associated with a human social pathology and individual differences in insect social behavior, thus providing an example of how comparative genomics can be used to test sociobiological theory.
E.O.威尔逊曾在 中提出，人类社会和动物社会之间的相似性反映了共同的机械和进化根源。1975 年提出这一颇具争议的假说时，科学还无法对其进行验证。我们利用基因组分析来确定人类和高度社会化的蜜蜂之间表面上的行为相似性是否反映了共同的分子机制。在这里，我们报告说，对各种显著社会刺激无反应的单个蜜蜂的基因表达特征显著富集了自闭症谱系障碍相关基因。这些特征发生在昆虫大脑的高级整合中心——蘑菇体中。此外，我们的发现是自闭症谱系障碍所特有的；其他蜜蜂行为的脑基因表达特征没有显示这种富集，来自其他人类行为和健康状况的数据集中也没有这种富集。这些结果表明，与人类社交病理学相关的基因以及昆虫社交行为中的个体差异具有深度保守性，从而为比较基因组学如何用于检验社会生物学理论提供了一个范例。
