Journal
PLOS ONE
Volume 8, Issue 12, Pages -Publisher
PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0081661
Keywords
-
Categories
Funding
- National Sciences Foundation of China [30630040]
- National Key Basic Research & Development Program 973 [2009CB825401, 2007CB946901]
- earmarked fund for Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System [CARS-45-KXJ3]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [NSFC 30571409]
- Nature and Science Foundation Commission of Zhejiang Province [R3080306]
- Australian Research Council through the ARC Centre of Excellence in Vision Science [CE0561903]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
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 4th to 6th 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.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available
Share Paper
