Understanding bees helps decipher human body

Jul 15, 2010 06:54 GMT  ·  By

A protein in the insulin signaling pathway is one of the factors that decide whether a female bee becomes a queen or just another worker, claim researchers from the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University.

Florian Wolschin, assistant research professor in ASU’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and lead author of the study, along with associate professor Gro Amdam, and postdoctoral research associate Navdeep S. Mutti, found that insulin plays a role in the bee development. They got to this conclusion by removing one of the proteins from the honeybee larvas' menu. This growth related protein is called IRS, or insulin receptor substrate, and it has also been connected to development and reproduction in mice. Scientists fed the larvae a queen's diet but without this protein, none turned into queens.

Besides IRS, there are other process parts that establish what will a bee ultimately become, like juvenile hormone, DNA methyltransferase and a protein called TOR, according to Wolschin. Nevertheless, it is the interaction between them that gives the final product – the Queen. As the professor says, “those are all very important and fundamental mechanisms. One single part cannot alone be responsible. It has to be the interplay between different mechanisms that finally results in the divergence of queens and workers.”

A queen bee has only one major role – laying eggs. There is also only one queen in the hive, supported and protected by all the other working bees. These last take care of the hive and the larvae, defend it and go out searching for food. It is almost unbelievable that these to types of female bees come from the same genome.

Whether a bee becomes a worker or a queen depends on what the nursing bees feed it. The insulin protein is very important, as insulin itself is essential to the body. It can be found in humans, in animals and lately, in bees, and it allows sugar to travel from the bloodstream to cells that will use it.

Honeybees are very important for our economy and also for the environment, because they insure pollination. As scientists have succeeded in reversing aging in some bees, they might also prove very useful for a better understanding of the human biology.