Figure 3.
Expression of the ecdysone receptor (EcR) in males (up) and females (down) depending on their reproductive status after the infection (a). Gene expression relative to the internal control gene rpl32 was quantified in nine replicate pools of three males and three females each exposed to the infection with M. marinum relative to their expression in uninfected controls. Each group at each time point was compared to its relative control independently (the line in each graph represents the controls’ relative expression with a log2 fold change of 0). Data was analysed for normality and significant differences were represented as follow: *P ≤ 0.05, **P ≤ 0.01 (Welch’s corrections for normally distributed data and Mann–Whitney test for not normally distributed data). Differences among the different groups were also analysed for each time point independently following the same approach. Differences were represented as follow: #P ≤ 0.05, ##P ≤ 0.01, ###P ≤ 0.001, and ####P ≤ 0.0001. Basal expression levels of the EcR gene in uninfected flies (b) were calculated using the 2-ΔCT method with the rpl32 gene for normalization (all values were multiplied by 104 for more visual results). Groups were compared independently for each time point. Data was analysed for normality and significant differences were represented as follow: *P ≤ 0.05, **P ≤ 0.01 (Kruskal–Wallis test). Finally, the correlation between the basal levels and the fold change after infection was performed using the nonparametric spearman correlation test (c).