Reversible changes that dictate how genes function may determine what jobs honeybees do in the hive.
Worker honeybees are literally born to be nurses that take care of larvae. After two to three weeks, the workers become foragers. That career change is accompanied by the addition of chemical tags called methyl groups to some of their genes, says a team of researchers led by epigeneticist Andrew Feinberg of Johns Hopkins University and biologist Gro Amdam of Arizona State University in Tempe and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Aas.
The addition of chemical tags, tweaks known as epigenetic modifications, changes genes’ activity but doesn’t alter the genes themselves. In honeybees, these modifications are also reversible: Forager bees that go back to being nurses also revert to the epigenetic pattern seen in nurses, the researchers report online September 16 in Nature Neuroscience.