Question of the Week, 22.2.2011
Female bee workers and bee queens share exactly the same genome. Nevertheless, there phenotypes differ dramatically: The queens bee’s abdomen is longer and – more importantly – she is the only sexually mature and reproductive female in one hive.
The bee workers select special larvae to become queens and feed them with a distinct amount of royal jelly. The special nutrition ignites a cascade of reactions leading to epigenetic effects, namely the methylation of some DNA sequences. The methyle groups change gene expression and can in part explain the behavioral and reproductive differences between the workers and the queen. Recently, scientists from the German Cancer Research Centre in Heidelberg, Germany, and the University of Canberra, Australia, discovered that more than 550 genes in the queen’s genome show a different methylation pattern than the workers’.
The methylation agglomerates in regions of the genes, where splicing – the process where the gene’s introns are removed – occurs. The authors conclude that the methylation may influence the splicing process therefore generating the queen’s distinc gene products. But how exactly the bee is crowned queen by epigenetics remains an open question.
Read more:
Leonie Mueck
Picture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Adult_queen_bee.jpg
