@article {Mallon018499, author = {Eamonn B. Mallon and Harindra E. Amarasinghe and Swidbert R. Ott}, title = {Acute and chronic gregarisation are associated with distinct DNA methylation fingerprints in desert locusts}, elocation-id = {018499}, year = {2016}, doi = {10.1101/018499}, publisher = {Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory}, abstract = {Desert locusts (Schistocerca gregaria) show a dramatic form of socially induced phenotypic plasticity known as phase polyphenism. In the absence of conspecifics, locusts occur in a shy and cryptic solitarious phase. Crowding with conspecifics drives a behavioural transformation towards gregariousness that occurs within hours and is followed by changes in physiology, colouration and morphology, resulting in the full gregarious phase syndrome. We analysed methylation-sensitive amplified fragment length polymorphisms (MS-AFLP) to compare the effect of acute and chronic crowding on DNA methylation in the central nervous system. We find that crowd-reared and solitary-reared locusts show markedly different neural MS-AFLP fingerprints. However, crowding for a day resulted in neural MS-AFLP fingerprints that were clearly distinct from both crowd-reared and uncrowded solitary-reared locusts. Our results indicate that changes in DNA methylation associated with behavioural gregarisation proceed through intermediate states that are not simply partial realisations of the endpoint states.}, URL = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/16/018499}, eprint = {https://www.biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/04/16/018499.full.pdf}, journal = {bioRxiv} }