Method

An annotated cDNA library and microarray for large-scale gene-expression studies in the ant Solenopsis invicta

John Wang^{* 1} , Stephanie Jemielity^{* 1} , Paolo Uva² , Yannick Wurm¹ , Johannes Gräff³ and Laurent Keller¹

¹Department of Ecology and Evolution, University of Lausanne, 1015 Lausanne, Switzerland

²Istituto di Ricerche di Biologia Molecolare, Merck Research Laboratories, 00040 Pomezia, Rome, Italy

³Brain Research Institute, University of Zürich/Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 8057 Zürich, Switzerland

author email corresponding author email* Contributed equally

Genome Biology 2007, 8:R9doi:10.1186/gb-2007-8-1-r9

Published:	15 January 2007

Subject areas: Genome studies, Molecular biology

Abstract

Ants display a range of fascinating behaviors, a remarkable level of intra-species phenotypic plasticity and many other interesting characteristics. Here we present a new tool to study the molecular mechanisms underlying these traits: a tentatively annotated expressed sequence tag (EST) resource for the fire ant Solenopsis invicta. From a normalized cDNA library we obtained 21,715 ESTs, which represent 11,864 putatively different transcripts with very diverse molecular functions. All ESTs were used to construct a cDNA microarray.