Australian black field crickets show changes in neural gene expression associated with socially-induced morphological, life-history, and behavioral plasticity

• Published in: BMC genomics Vol. 17; no. 1; p. 827
• Main Authors: Kasumovic, Michael M, Chen, Zhiliang, Wilkins, Marc R
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England BioMed Central Ltd 24-10-2016; BioMed Central
• Subjects: Analysis; Animals; Behavior, Animal; Biological Evolution; Cluster Analysis; Computational Biology - methods; Crickets; Evolutionary genetics; Female; Gene Expression; Gene Expression Profiling; Gene Ontology; Genetic aspects; Gryllidae - anatomy & histology; Gryllidae - physiology; Male; Molecular Sequence Annotation; Neurons - metabolism; Phenotype; Quantitative Trait, Heritable; Sex Factors; Australia; Transcriptome analysis; Sexual selection; Behaviour; Developmental plasticity; Black field cricket; Teleogryllus commodus; Gene expression
• ISSN: 1471-2164; 1471-2164
• DOI: 10.1186/s12864-016-3119-y

Ecological and evolutionary model organisms have provided extensive insight into the ecological triggers, adaptive benefits, and evolution of life-history driven developmental plasticity. Despite this, we still have a poor understanding of the underlying genetic changes that occur during shifts towards different developmental trajectories. The goal of this study is to determine whether we can identify underlying gene expression patterns that can describe the different life-history trajectories individuals follow in response to social cues of competition. To do this, we use the Australian black field cricket (Teleogryllus commodus), a species with sex-specific developmental trajectories moderated by the density and quality of calls heard during immaturity. In this study, we manipulated the social information males and females could hear by rearing individuals in either calling or silent treatments. We next used RNA-Seq to develop a reference transcriptome to study changes in brain gene expression at two points prior to sexual maturation.
We show accelerated development in both sexes when exposed to calling; changes were also seen in growth, lifespan, and reproductive effort. Functional relationships between genes and phenotypes were apparent from ontological enrichment analysis. We demonstrate that increased investment towards traits such as growth and reproductive effort were often associated with the expression of a greater number of genes with similar effect, thus providing a suite of candidate genes for future research in this and other invertebrate organisms.
Our results provide interesting insight into the genomic underpinnings of developmental plasticity and highlight the potential of a genomic exploration of other evolutionary theories such as condition dependence and sex-specific developmental strategies.