The magnitude and functional patterns of intraspecific transcriptional variation in the anophelines, including those of sex-biased genes underlying sex-specific traits relevant for malaria transmission, remain understudied. As a result, how changes in expression levels drive adaptation in these species is poorly understood. We sequenced the female, male, and larval transcriptomes of three populations of Anopheles arabiensis from Burkina Faso. One-third of the genes were differentially expressed between populations, often involving insecticide resistance-related genes in a sample type-specific manner, and with the females showing the largest number of differentially expressed genes. At the genomic level, the X chromosome appears depleted of differentially expressed genes compared with the autosomes, chromosomes harboring inversions do not exhibit evidence for enrichment of such genes, and genes that are top contributors to functional enrichment patterns of population differentiation tend to be clustered in the genome. Further, the magnitude of variation for the sex expression ratio across populations did not substantially differ between male- and female-biased genes, except for some populations in which male-limited expressed genes showed more variation than their female counterparts. In fact, female-biased genes exhibited a larger level of interpopulation variation than male-biased genes, both when assayed in males and females. Beyond uncovering the extensive adaptive potential of transcriptional variation in An. Arabiensis, our findings suggest that the evolutionary rate of changes in expression levels on the X chromosome exceeds that on the autosomes, while pointing to female-biased genes as the most variable component of the An. Arabiensis transcriptome.

中文翻译：

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阿拉伯按蚊种内转录组变异和性别偏向表达

按蚊中种内转录变异的大小和功能模式，包括与疟疾传播相关的性别特异性特征的性别偏见基因，仍未得到充分研究。因此，人们对表达水平的变化如何推动这些物种的适应知之甚少。我们对来自布基纳法索的三个阿拉伯按蚊种群的雌性、雄性和幼虫转录组进行了测序。三分之一的基因在种群之间存在差异表达，通常以样本类型特异性的方式涉及杀虫剂抗性相关基因，并且雌性显示出最多的差异表达基因。在基因组水平上，与常染色体相比，X 染色体似乎缺乏差异表达基因，携带倒位的染色体没有显示出这些基因富集的证据，而对种群分化的功能富集模式做出最大贡献的基因往往聚集在基因组中。此外，性别表达比率的变异幅度在男性和女性偏向基因之间没有显着差异，除了一些男性限制表达基因比女性基因表现出更多变异的人群。事实上，在男性和女性中进行分析时，偏向女性的基因比偏向男性的基因表现出更大水平的群体间变异。除了揭示 An 中转录变异的广泛适应性潜力。阿拉伯，我们的研究结果表明，X 染色体上表达水平变化的进化速率超过了常染色体，同时指出偏向女性的基因是 An 中最可变的组成部分。阿拉伯人转录组。