Journal
JOURNAL OF EXPERIMENTAL BIOLOGY
Volume 214, Issue 22, Pages 3808-3821Publisher
COMPANY BIOLOGISTS LTD
DOI: 10.1242/jeb.060244
Keywords
Apis mellifera; metabolism; transcriptomics
Categories
Funding
- National Institutes of Health [1R01DK082605-01A1]
- National Science Foundation [0425852]
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Emerging Frontiers [0425852] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Worker honey bees undergo a socially regulated, highly stable lipid loss as part of their behavioral maturation. We used large-scale transcriptomic and proteomic experiments, physiological experiments and RNA interference to explore the mechanistic basis for this lipid loss. Lipid loss was associated with thousands of gene expression changes in abdominal fat bodies. Many of these genes were also regulated in young bees by nutrition during an initial period of lipid gain. Surprisingly, in older bees, which is when maximum lipid loss occurs, diet played less of a role in regulating fat body gene expression for components of evolutionarily conserved nutrition-related endocrine systems involving insulin and juvenile hormone signaling. By contrast, fat body gene expression in older bees was regulated more strongly by evolutionarily novel regulatory factors, queen mandibular pheromone (a honey bee-specific social signal) and vitellogenin (a conserved yolk protein that has evolved novel, maturation-related functions in the bee), independent of nutrition. These results demonstrate that conserved molecular pathways can be manipulated to achieve stable lipid loss through evolutionarily novel regulatory processes.
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