Figure 1.

qRT-PCR analysis of tissue-specific relative expression levels of methyl farnesoate epoxidase (MFE) across castes of B. terrestris. MFE is crucial in synthetizing juvenile hormone (JH). It is heavily upregulated in gonads of workers and reproducing queen. It is also found in brains of all samples (see main text). Data represent mean ± SEM (n = 3–5) of normalized and rescaled expression levels. (A) Heatmap: Log-scale. Bar graphs: Relative transcript levels in linear scale (B) and log-transformed scale (C). Significantly different expression levels are indicated by different letters (p < 0.05).