%0 Journal Article
%T Epigenetic regulation of the honey bee transcriptome: unravelling the nature of methylated genes
%A Sylvain Foret
%A Robert Kucharski
%A Yvonne Pittelkow
%A Gabrielle A Lockett
%A Ryszard Maleszka
%J BMC Genomics
%D 2009
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-2164-10-472
%X We combined microarray profiling of several tissues with genome-scale bioinformatics and bisulfite sequencing of selected genes to study the honey bee methylome. We find that around 35% of the annotated honey bee genes are expected to be methylated at the CpG dinucleotides by a highly conserved DNA methylation system. We show that one unifying feature of the methylated genes in this species is their broad pattern of expression and the associated 'housekeeping' roles. In contrast, genes involved in more stringently regulated spatial or temporal functions are predicted to be un-methylated.Our data suggest that honey bees use CpG methylation of intragenic regions as an epigenetic mechanism to control the levels of activity of the genes that are broadly expressed and might be needed for conserved core biological processes in virtually every type of cell. We discuss the implications of our findings for genome-scale regulatory network structures and the evolution of the role(s) of DNA methylation in eukaryotes. Our findings are particularly important in the context of the emerging evidence that environmental factors can influence the epigenetic settings of some genes and lead to serious metabolic and behavioural disorders.In eukaryotes, gene activity is regulated by several interacting systems operating at a number of levels, including epigenetic modifications of DNA [1,2]. One such mechanism is DNA methylation that has the capacity to establish and maintain diverse patterns of gene expression from the same genome under specific temporal, spatial and environmental conditions [3]. This ability to selectively modulate gene activity is a key evolutionary invention that is critical to generating the variety of cell types and phenotypic polymorphism in eukaryotic species. DNA methylation is widespread among eukaryotic species, but both the level and overall pattern of methylation vary noticeably in different lineages [3,4]. It is believed that this post-replication modificatio
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2164/10/472