2025-09-19 ロックフェラー大学
Web要約 の発言:
<関連情報>
- https://www.rockefeller.edu/news/38309-how-an-ants-nose-knows/
- https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(25)01196-0
転写干渉がアリにおける単一遺伝子性嗅覚受容体発現を制御する Transcriptional interference gates monogenic odorant receptor expression in ants
Giacomo L. Glotzer ∙ P. Daniel H. Pastor ∙ Daniel J.C. Kronauer
Current Biology Published:September 19, 2025
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.09.026
Highlights
- Ant odorant receptor promoters generate bidirectional non-coding transcripts
- Non-canonical readthrough transcription suppresses downstream genes
- Antisense long non-coding RNAs prevent upstream gene expression
- These mechanisms generalize to other insects, including honeybees and other ants
Summary
Communication is crucial to social life, and in ants, it is mediated primarily through olfaction. Ants have more odorant receptor (OR) genes than any other group of insects, generated through tandem duplications that produce large genomic arrays of related genes. The mechanism by which olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) produce a single functional OR from these arrays remains unclear. In ant OSNs, only mRNA from one OR in an array is exported into the cytoplasm, while upstream genes are silent and transcripts from downstream genes remain nuclear. Here, we show that readthrough transcription in the downstream direction generates non-translated transcripts. We also find that OR promoters are bidirectional, producing antisense long non-coding RNAs. We suspect that neither readthrough nor antisense transcription produces functional RNA but that bidirectional transcription alone is critical to suppressing the expression of all other OR genes in a tandem array. Finally, we present evidence that this regulatory architecture is conserved across ants and bees, suggesting that this mechanism for functionally monogenic OR expression is widespread in insects with expanded OR repertoires.
