Gene network underlying social immunity

We want to quantify the network of genes that underlies social immunity in order to understand vulnerability to pathogens in social species. We have performed an experiment in a factorial design with solitary and group-kept bumblebees that were either infected with a pathogen (E. coli) or  servedas uninfected controls. We have performed 8 replicates in total with two genetically distinct bumblebee genotypes. We are aiming at indentifying the gene regulatory network by means of whole transcriptome sequencing (RNA seq) of all individuals (N=32). This will allow us to pick up theoverall differential gene expression between treatments and additionally will allow for an individualbased analysis to infer the major regulatory hub genes due to the ability to study co-regulated genesand pathways.