Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Friday, 14 March 2008 21:05
Science -
Biology
Page 1 of 2
The fact that royal jelly is the magic ingredient honeybee larvae need
to become queens instead of workers is well known, but new ANU research
finally sheds light on the reasons why.
The Australian National University (ANU) has announced
new research on honeybees, queen bees, the nature/nuture divide and royal jelly that has made a beeline straight into the latest edition of the journal ‘Science’.
The ANU’s ‘Research School of Biological Sciences’ has had its scientists hard at work investigating the properties of royal jelly, and have discovered that honeybees which are chosen to enjoy a “copious and exclusive diet” of the regal stuff have a genetic switch turned on – a switch that either turns them into the queen on top of the bee hierarchy, or a worker living a “life of drudgery”.
The report published in Science is called the “Nutritional Control of Reproductive Status in Honeybees via DNA Methylation”, with the abstact
here, the full PDF
here (subscription required), and supporting online material
here.
In the process of making the discovery, the ANU says the research also “adds new weight to the role of environmental factors in the nature/nurture divide.”
Research team member Dr Ryszard Maleszka said that: “Royal jelly seems to chemically modify the bee’s genome by a process called DNA methylation and disrupts the expression of genes that turn young bees into workers”.
Dr Maleszka also said that: “When we ‘silenced’ a gene controlling DNA methylation without recourse to royal jelly, we discovered that the larvae began to develop as queens with the associated fertility, rather than as infertile workers.”
The ANU says that Dr Maleszka and his colleagues “believe this is the first time that DNA methylation has been functionally implicated in insects. The molecular process is common in vertebrates – including humans.”
In further explaining the research, Dr Maleszka notes that: “If you have identical human twins, and one develops schizophrenia, then you need another mechanism to explain how this can occur when they have the same genetic blueprint. DNA methylation links genomes to environmental factors like nutrition and modifies how genes express themselves. Discovering this in bees, which are a much simpler biological model than humans, means we have a better opportunity of understanding more about how this process occurs.”
So, what will the researchers do next? Please read onto page 2.
