319V Poster Online - Virtual Posters
Tuesday June 07, 11:00 AM - 3:00 PM

Authors:
Bahar Patlar; Kathleen A. Dogantzis; Amro Zayed

Affiliation: York University, Toronto, ON, Canada

Keywords:
Molecular Evolution

Male reproductive genes, especially ones coding seminal fluid proteins are known amongst the most rapidly evolving genes. Thus, they likely accumulate genetic differences between populations at a high rate that may eventually contribute to speciation. However, our knowledge is limited on the amount of molecular variation in seminal fluid genes among the different genetic populations within a species. Honeybee, Apis mellifera consists of at least seven genetically distinct evolutionary lineages (Africa: A and L lineages, Asia: Y and O lineages, Europe: C lineage, and Eurasia: M lineage, Madagascar island: U lineage) that occur naturally over the vast and varied geographical areas across the world. These lineages are ideal to examine the level of molecular variation in seminal fluid genes between populations and within species. Therefore, in this study, we first combined the list of drone seminal fluid and sperm proteins which were reported in previous studies to consolidate current knowledge on the identity of the honeybee reproductive genes. Next, we estimated F_ST, a relative measure of differentiation, for each ejaculate protein-coding gene to identify genes that may have been subject to selection and contributing lineage diversity. Preliminary results have shown that the drone ejaculate contains in total 549 unique proteins, among them, 209 and 263 proteins were identified as in seminal fluid or sperm-specific, respectively. The rest of the proteins couldn’t be classified as belonging to one or another group, however, they could belong to both. We are currently performing F_ST analyses to understand the amount and patterns of differentiation in ejaculate proteins among genetically distinct lineages of honeybees.