Construction and Primary Analysis of Suppression Subtractive Hybridization Libraries for Female Apis cerana

The two different phenotypes of honeybees, queen and workers, are determined by the differences of gene expressions rather than the polymorphisms of the genetic material. The aim was to construct differential gene expression libraries by suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) for queen and worker bees of Apis cerana.We obtained 161 and 142 high quality ESTs sequences form queen and worker bees,respectively.After using DNAstar seqMan for carriers and joints removing,low quality sequence filtering,and ESTs clustering,we finally obtained 110 and 81 contings for queen and worker bees subtracted libraries,respectively.There are overlapping ESTs sequences for both queen and worker bees subtracted libraries. Using sequence homology analysis by BLASTx and BLASTn,62 out of 65 ESTs from the queen subtracted library and 49 out of 57 ESTs from the worker subtracted library are found to have homologous genes,respectively. Gene function analysis by Gene Ontology (GO) suggested that the products of majority of the differentially expressed genes are enzymes and binding protein, which are involved in gene transcription,translation and metabolism process.The female A.cerana subtracted libraries constructed in our study provide important information for the further studies of the mechanism of caste determination.