Nakayama, S. | Search bioRxiv

bioRxiv2020

AnAms1.0: A high-quality chromosome-scale assembly of a domestic cat Felis catus of American Shorthair breed

The domestic cat (Felis catus) is one of the most popular companion animals in the world. Comprehensive genomic resources will aid the development and application of veterinary medicine including to improve feline health, in particular, to enable precision medicine which is promising in human application. However, currently available cat genome assemblies were mostly built based on the Abyssinian cat breed which is highly inbred and has limited power in representing the vast diversity of the cat population. Moreover, the current reference assembly remains fragmented with sequences contained in thousands of scaffolds. We constructed a reference-grade chromosome-scale genome assembly of a domestic cat, Felis catus genome of American Shorthair breed, Anicom American shorthair 1.0 (AnAms1.0) with high contiguity (scaffold N50 > 120 Mb), by combining multiple advanced genomic technologies, including PacBio long-read sequencing as well as sequence scaffolding by long-range genomic information obtained from Hi-C and optical mapping data. Homology-based and ab initio gene annotation was performed with the Iso-Seq data. Analyzed data is be publicly accessible on Cats genome informatics (Cats-I, https://cat.annotation.jp/), a cat genome database established as a platform to facilitate the accumulation and sharing of genomic resources to improve veterinary care.

genomics↗

bioRxiv2020

Is diversity in worker body size important for the performance of bumble bee colonies?

Specialization and plasticity are important for many forms of collective behavior, but the interplay between these factors is little understood. In insect societies, workers are often predisposed to specialize in different tasks, sometimes with morphological or physiological adaptations, facilitating a division of labor. Workers may also plastically switch between tasks or vary their effort. The degree to which predisposed specialization limits plasticity is not clear and has not been systematically tested in ecologically relevant contexts. We addressed this question in 20 freely-foraging bumble bee (Bombus terrestris) colonies by continually manipulating colonies to contain either a typically diverse or reduced ("homogeneous") worker body size distribution, over two trials. Pooling both trials, diverse colonies did better in several indices of colony performance. The importance of body size was further demonstrated by the finding that foragers were larger than nurses even in homogeneous colonies with a very narrow body size range. However, the overall effect of size diversity stemmed mostly from one trial. In the other trial, homogeneous and diverse colonies showed comparable performance. By comparing behavioral profiles based on several thousand observations, we found evidence that workers in homogeneous colonies in this trial rescued colony performance by plastically increasing behavioral specialization and/or individual effort, compared to same-sized individuals in diverse colonies. Our results are consistent with a benefit to colonies of predisposed (size-diverse) specialists under certain conditions, but also suggest that plasticity or effort, can compensate for reduced (size-related) specialization. Thus, we suggest that an intricate interplay between specialization and plasticity is functionally adaptive in bumble bee colonies.

animal behavior and cognition↗