Abstract
It is still not understood how honey bee parasite changes the gene expression to adapt to the host environment and how the host simultaneously responds to the parasite infection by modifying its own gene expression. To address this question, we studied a trypanosomatid, Lotmaria passim, which can be cultured in medium and inhabit the honey bee hindgut. We found that L. passim decreases mRNAs associated with protein translation, glycolysis, detoxification of radical oxygen species, and kinetoplast respiratory chain to adapt to the anaerobic and nutritionally poor honey bee hindgut during the infection. After the long term infection, the host appears to be in poor nutritional status, indicated by the increase and decrease of take-out and vitellogenin mRNAs, respectively. Simultaneous gene expression profiling of L. passim and honey bee during infection by dual RNA-seq provided insight into how both parasite and host modify their gene expressions.
Highlights
It is still not understood how honey bee parasite changes the gene expression to adapt to the host environment and how the host simultaneously responds to the parasite infection by modifying its own gene expression
There was large variation in the number of parasites among the infected individual honey bees. These results demonstrate that L. passim starts to actively proliferate in the honey bee hindgut between 8 and 15 days after the infection
The infected honey bees survived 26–42 days after infection and this time period was slightly shorter than that of control uninfected honey bees (Fig. 1b). These results indicate that the accumulation of parasites in the honey bee hindgut does not induce rapid death of the host under laboratory condition
Summary
It is still not understood how honey bee parasite changes the gene expression to adapt to the host environment and how the host simultaneously responds to the parasite infection by modifying its own gene expression. We poorly understand how parasites adapt to the honey bee environment when they start establishing the infection and how they react against the host responses during infection maintenance. L. passim can be cultured in medium and infects the hindgut when orally introduced to the honey bee[7] These characteristics are similar to those of Crithidia bombi, a major trypanosomatid parasite of bumble bee[21,22]. Changes in C. bombi gene expression profile during the infection have never been studied Since both L. passim and C. bombi are present in hindguts of honey bee and bumble bee, respectively, they must interact with the gut microbiota.
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