Abstract
Aphids produce wing and wingless morphs, depending on the environmental conditions during their complex life cycles. Wing and wingless variations play an important role in migration and host alternation, affecting the migration and host alternation processes. Several transcriptional studies have concentrated on aphids and sought to determine how an organism perceives environmental cues and responds in a plastic manner, but the underlying mechanisms have remained unclear. Therefore, to better understand the molecular mechanisms underlying the wing polyphenism of this fascinating phenomenon, we provide the first report concerning the wing development of aphids in bird cherry-oat aphid Rhopalosiphum padi with comparative transcriptional analysis of all the developmental stages by RNA-Seq. We identified several candidate genes related to biogenic amines and hormones that may be specifically involved in wing development. Moreover, we found that the third instar stage might be a critical stage for visibility of alternative morphs as well as changes in the expression of thirty-three genes associated with wing development. Several genes, i.e., Wnt2, Fng, Uba1, Hh, Foxo, Dpp, Brk, Ap, Dll, Hth, Tsh, Nub, Scr, Antp, Ubx, Asc, Srf and Fl, had different expression levels in different developmental stages and may play important roles in regulating wing polyphenism.
Highlights
Organisms can flexibly alter their phenotypes in response to external stimuli to adapt to their surrounding environments, a phenomenon referred to as phenotypic plasticity[1]
Our analysis showed that 90% to 100% of offspring were winged when mothers were reared under crowded conditions for 16 h, whereas parthenogenetic females reared under solitary conditions produced less than 10% winged offspring (Table S1)
Environmental factors can affect the wing polyphenism, crowded conditions were sufficient for high production of winged offspring by a group of aphids, while aphids reared under solitary treatment conditions never produced winged aphids or produced fewer winged offspring, indicating that crowded or solitary conditions result in drastic changes for aphids and are conditions that require gene expression responses
Summary
Organisms can flexibly alter their phenotypes in response to external stimuli to adapt to their surrounding environments, a phenomenon referred to as phenotypic plasticity[1]. Some species can display different morphs of phenotypic plasticity despite having the same genotype in response to specific environments, a phenomenon referred to as polyphenism[2,3]. This is an adaptive behavioral strategy widely used by insects that live in heterogeneous environments, such as the wing and wingless morph development of aphids[4,5,6]. Previous transcriptional studies have focused on some developmental stages of aphids, e.g., winged and wingless adults[12,14,16,17], embryo and winged www.nature.com/scientificreports/. R. padi is a useful experimental model for studying wing polyphenism
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