Jelly role in DNA methylation

Source: ANU

New Australian National University research may explain why eating royal jelly destines honeybee larvae to become queens instead of workers.

Scientists from the Research School of Biological Sciences at ANU have discovered that a copious diet of royal jelly flicks a genetic switch in young bees that determines whether they'll become a queen, or live a life of drudgery.

Their findings are published in the latest edition of Science.

"Royal jelly seems to chemically modify the bee's genome by a process called DNA methylation and disrupts the expression of genes that turn young bees into workers," Dr Ryszard Maleszka, from the school's Visual Sciences Group, said.

"When we silenced a gene controlling DNA methylation without recourse to royal jelly, we discovered that the larvae began to develop as queens with the associated fertility, rather than as infertile workers."

Maleszka and his colleagues believe this is the first time that DNA methylation has been functionally implicated in insects. The molecular process is common in vertebrates.

"DNA methylation links genomes to environmental factors like nutrition and modifies how genes express themselves. Discovering this in bees, which are a much simpler biological model than humans, means we have a better opportunity of understanding more about how this process occurs."

The researchers will continue to study how DNA methylation affects bees, as they suspect that the process could also be responsible for how the insects' brains develop, and may thus be connected to bee behaviour and even social organisation.

The research suggests that environmental factors, such as how organisms are nurtured, can have a major influence on how they develop.

The research team includes Joanna Maleszka, Dr Robert Kucharski and Dr Sylvain Foret. The current work grew out of the honeybee genome project, which mapped the entire genetic blueprint of bees.