Abstract
Simple SummaryIn the class of insects, bees are advanced evolutionary groups that play a pivotal role in ecosystem balance, agriculture, and food security. Transposons are the driving factors of genome evolution and speciation, which shape the genomes of almost all organisms. Among them, the Tc1/mariner and pogo superfamily, as the most widely distributed transposons in nature, are widely reported in insects. However, in bees, the research on transposons has never been systematically reported. Therefore, this study focuses on annotating the transposons of the Tc1/mariner and pogo superfamily of bees that were sequenced, revealing the distribution, diversity, potential activities, evolutionary patterns, and structural characteristics of transposons in different bees.Bees (Apoidea), the largest and most crucial radiation of pollinators, play a vital role in the ecosystem balance. Transposons are widely distributed in nature and are important drivers of species diversity. However, transposons are rarely reported in important pollinators such as bees. Here, we surveyed 37 bee genomesin Apoidea, annotated the pogo and Tc1/mariner transposons in the genome of each species, and performed a phylogenetic analysis and determined their overall distribution. The pogo and Tc1/mariner families showed high diversity and low abundance in the 37 species, and their proportion was significantly higher in solitary bees than in social bees. DD34D/mariner was found to be distributed in almost all species and was found in Apis mellifera, Apis mellifera carnica, Apis mellifera caucasia, and Apis mellifera mellifera, and Euglossa dilemma may still be active. Using horizontal transfer analysis, we found that DD29-30D/Tigger may have experienced horizontal transfer (HT) events. The current study displayed the evolution profiles (including diversity, activity, and abundance) of the pogo and Tc1/mariner transposons across 37 species of Apoidea. Our data revealed their contributions to the genomic variations across these species and facilitated in understanding of the genome evolution of this lineage.
Highlights
Bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), which originated in the early to mid-cretaceous era [1], are the largest and most crucial radiation of pollinators with more than 20,000 described species [2]
To survey the distribution and diversity of pogo and Tc1/mariner DNA transposons in 37 sequenced genomes of Apoidea, we selected several representative transposase sequences from the well-defined families of pogo (DD35D/Passer, DD35D/Fot, DD29-42D/Lemi, DD29-59D/pogoR, DD36D/Mover, DD29-36D/Tigger) and Tc1/mariner (DD34E/Tc1, DD35E/TR, DD36E/IC, DD37E/TRT, DD38E/IT, DD34D/mariner, DD37D/maT, DD39D/Guest and DD41D/VS) superfamilies and subjected them to a TblastN search against the Apoidea genomes deposited in a whole-genome shotgun database with default parameters (1e-10)
The phylogenetic tree was used to define the evolutionary relationships of the pogo and Tc1/mariner elements in Apoidea that we identified
Summary
Bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea), which originated in the early to mid-cretaceous era [1], are the largest and most crucial radiation of pollinators with more than 20,000 described species [2]. In the superfamily of Apoidea, seven extant families are recognized: Megachilidae and Apidae of the long-tongued families Andrenidae, Colletidae, Halictidae, and Melittidae, and Stenotritidae of the short-tongued families [1,5]. Apidae has the largest family size, with >5900 described species, followed by Halictidae and Megachilidae with >4000 species [2]. Melittidae, with 204 known species, is viewed as the most basal bee family [1,6], some earlier studies have argued that Colletidae is the sister group to the rest of the bees [7,8]. The emergence of different views relates to advances in molecular and genome research, which has substantially changed and continues to change the understanding of classifications and relationships in bees [3,9,10]
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