Plant chemical that determines a honey bee's caste has been found

A study was reported in the journal Science Advances shows that broad developmental changes occur when honey bee larvae are switched from eating royal jelly to a diet of jelly that includes honey and beebread, which is a type of processed pollen. Beebread and honey contain p-coumaric acid, but royal jelly does not. Queens feed exclusively on royal jelly. Worker bees known as nurses feed the larvae according to the needs of the hive. The study also used some recombinant proteins to achieve some results.

Experiments revealed that ingesting p-coumaric acid pushes the honey bee larvae down a different developmental pathway from those fed only royal jelly. Some genes, about a third of the honey bee genome, are upregulated and another third are downregulated, changing the landscape of proteins available to help fight disease or develop the bees' reproductive parts.

"Consuming the phytochemical p-coumaric acid, which is ubiquitous in beebread and honey, alters the expression of a whole suite of genes involved in caste determination," said University of Illinois entomology professor and department head May Berenbaum, who conducted the study with research scientist Wenfu Mao and cell and developmental biology professor Mary Schuler.

According to May Berenbaum, compared with the question of what components in royal jelly lead to queen development for many years, what might be more important is which plant chemicals that can interfere with development.

"While previous molecular studies have provided simple snapshots of the gene transcript variations that are associated with the exposure of insects to natural and synthetic chemicals, the genomics approaches used in this study offer a significantly more complex perspective on the biochemical and physiological processes occurring in plant-insect interactions," said Schuler.

This research about how honey bee colonies determine which larvae will serve as workers and which will become queens shows that a plant chemical, p-coumaric acid, plays a key role in the bees' developmental fate. Flarebio provides you with superior recombinant proteins like recombinant CDH11 at good prices.