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RNAi-mediated Double Gene Knockdown and Gustatory Perception Measurement in Honey Bees Apis mellifera
Published on: July 25, 2013
Recipe for a busy bee: microRNAs in Honey Bee caste determination
Xiangqian Guo1, Songkun Su2, Geir Skogerboe3
1Bioinformatics Laboratory and National Laboratory of Biomacromolecules, Institute of Biophysics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China ; Graduate School of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
Abstract:
Social caste determination in the honey bee is assumed to be determined by the dietary status of the young larvae and translated into physiological and epigenetic changes through nutrient-sensing pathways. We have employed Illumina/Solexa sequencing to examine the small RNA content in the bee larval food, and show that worker jelly is enriched in miRNA complexity and abundance relative to royal jelly. The miRNA levels in worker jelly were 7-215 fold higher than in royal jelly, and both jellies showed dynamic changes in miRNA content during the 4(th) to 6(th) day of larval development. Adding specific miRNAs to royal jelly elicited significant changes in queen larval mRNA expression and morphological characters of the emerging adult queen bee. We propose that miRNAs in the nurse bee secretions constitute an additional element in the regulatory control of caste determination in the honey bee.
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