PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Harindra E. Amarasinghe AU - Eamonn B. Mallon AU - Swidbert R. Ott TI - Socially induced behavioural plasticity precedes pronounced epigenetic differentiation in the CNS of Desert Locusts AID - 10.1101/018499 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 018499 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018499.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018499.full AB - 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 rearing the offspring of gregarious-phase locusts in social isolation causes pronounced differentiation of the neuromethylome within an individual’s life-time. Crowding isolation-reared locusts for a day, however, has no significant effect on their MS-AFLP fingerprint. The differentiation of the neuromethylome seen in long-term gregarious locusts is therefore unrelated to the acquisition and expression of gregarious behaviour, suggesting that it serves to consolidate long-term phase state.