Draft genome sequence of the Asian honey bee, Apis cerana

Abstract

The honey bee is an important animal model in agricultural industry and basic sciences to understand molecular and neural mechanisms underlying various repertoires of social behavior. Along with its importance, the genome information of the Western honey bee, Apis mellifera, was published in 2006. The Eastern honey bee, Apis cerana, which is being raised in many Asian countries for thousands years and have brought considerable economic benefits to apicultural industry and showed different biological traits compared to A. mellifera, have played a key role in keeping the biodiversity of eastern and southern part of Asia. However, the genome information of A. cerana is currently unknown. In this respect, we here report whole genome information of A. cerana using de novo sequencing methods. The present study, we first reported the 238 Mbp draft genome of the A. cerana. We also assembled 99% completed circular mitochondrial genome. We generated 10,651 genes and analyzed orthologous protein groups between social and non-social insects. Of these genes, about 72% genes had more than one GO term and 1,696 enzymes were categorized into 125 pathways. Genes involved in chemoreception and immunity were carefully identified, which appeared the similar expansion to A. mellifera. Here we specially characterized 8 gustatory receptors (Grs), 119 odorant receptors (Ors), and 10 ionotropic receptors (Irs) in A. cerana genome and 55 immune-related genes.