Yuan Yiyang, Wang Yanyan, Ye Wanwan, Xie Liqiang, Yuan Erliang, Guo Huijuan, Wang Shifan, Dong Fang, Zhu-Salzman Keyan, Ge Feng, Sun Yucheng
Institute of Plant Protection, Shandong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Jinan, Shandong Province 250100, China.
State Key Laboratory of Animal Biodiversity Conservation and Integrated Pest Management, Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China.
iScience. 2025 May 6;28(6):112591. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2025.112591. eCollection 2025 Jun 20.
Aphid wing dimorphism is a textbook example of transgenerational phenotypic plasticity, but the signaling mechanism from mother to daughter remains unclear. We showed that the physical contact and crowding treatment caused high proportion of winged offspring in the pea aphid . RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) analysis indicated that the expression of brain () and embryonic () were increased by physical contact and crowding treatments. Knockdown of either gene inhibited phosphorylation of ApFoxO in embryos. Furthermore, electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSA) showed that dephosphorylated ApFoxO directly bound to the promotor of () to repress its transcription in stage 20 embryos, causing a lower winged proportion. Our results demonstrated that brain and embryonic coordinately relayed the maternal physical contact signals and control wing development in offspring, showcasing a regulatory mechanism underlying physical contact-dependent, transgenerational wing dimorphism in aphids.
蚜虫翅二型性是跨代表型可塑性的一个典型教科书示例，但从母体到子代的信号传导机制仍不清楚。我们发现，物理接触和拥挤处理会导致豌豆蚜产生高比例的有翅后代。RNA测序（RNA-seq）分析表明，物理接触和拥挤处理会使脑（）和胚胎（）的表达增加。敲低任一基因都会抑制胚胎中ApFoxO的磷酸化。此外，电泳迁移率变动分析（EMSA）表明，去磷酸化的ApFoxO直接与（）的启动子结合，以抑制其在20期胚胎中的转录，从而导致有翅比例降低。我们的结果表明，脑（）和胚胎（）协同传递母体物理接触信号并控制子代的翅发育，展示了蚜虫中依赖物理接触的跨代翅二型性的调控机制。
