Mapping and recombination analysis of two moth colour mutations, Black moth and Wild wing spot, in the silkworm Bombyx mori.

Many lepidopteran insects exhibit body colour variations, where the high phenotypic diversity observed in the wings and bodies of adults provides opportunities for studying adaptive morphological evolution. In the silkworm Bombyx mori, two genes responsible for moth colour mutation, Bm and Ws, have been mapped to 0.0 and 14.7 cM of the B. mori genetic linkage group 17; however, these genes have not been identified at the molecular level. We performed positional cloning of both genes to elucidate the molecular mechanisms that underlie the moth wing- and body-colour patterns in B. mori. We successfully narrowed down Bm and Ws to ~2-Mb-long and 100-kb-long regions on the same scaffold Bm_scaf33. Gene prediction analysis of this region identified 77 candidate genes in the Bm region, whereas there were no candidate genes in the Ws region. Fluorescence in-situ hybridisation analysis in Bm mutant detected chromosome inversion, which explains why there are no recombination in the corresponding region. The comparative genomic analysis demonstrated that the candidate regions of both genes shared synteny with a region associated with wing- and body-colour variations in other lepidopteran species including Biston betularia and Heliconius butterflies. These results suggest that the genes responsible for wing and body colour in B. mori may be associated with similar genes in other Lepidoptera.