Caste-based gene expression analysis in the red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus

Colonies of the red harvester ant, Pogonomyrmex barbatus, exhibit a reproductive division of labor where the queen acts as the sole reproductive unit of the colony and workers contribute to tasks involved in growth and maintenance of the colony. While the genetic makeup of the colony members are similar the morphology and internal physiology differs between castes based on their functional role. The red harvester ants provide a model to explore the molecular mechanisms that underlie gene expression patterns involved in caste specialization and, analyzing caste-based gene expression could provide insight into genes involved in this process. In this study we investigate gene expression changes through transcriptomic analysis of publicly available RNA-SEQ data using the P. barbatus genome as a reference. All analyses were performed on the Galaxy platform. We used FASTQC to determine the quality of our reads, then used HISAT2 for alignment. We then used StringTie to assemble our transcripts and DEseq2 to determine significantly differentially expressed genes (p< 0.05). We annotated the molecular and biological function of each differentially expressed gene using BLAST through the Uniprot database.