No creature is spared the ravages of disease. For bees, American foulbrood is as ghastly as it sounds: the bacterium that causes this scourge turns infected honeybee larvae into a twisted brown gunk. It’s fatal to bee colonies; beekeepers often burn an infected hive to protect their remaining hives. For shrimp, there’s no cure for white spot syndrome virus. It causes up to 100 percent mortality in infected farmed populations within three to 10 days, and it can spread to wild crustaceans, too.
For years, conventional wisdom held that invertebrates such as honeybees and shrimp lacked the antibody-generating adaptive immune systems of vertebrates and could not be vaccinated. People turned to antibiotics to prevent bacterial outbreaks, but indiscriminate use can disrupt animals’ microbiomes and fuel antibiotic resistance. Now, biotech innovators are vaccinating these creatures against pathogens, and the bee vaccine has bagged the first-ever conditional license for an insect vaccine from the United States Department of Agriculture. Lily Burton brings the buzz for Science News.
💉 Inheriting immunity
The secret lies in transgenerational immune priming. Instead of generating antibodies like a traditional vaccine, scientists think the new vaccines make modifications to invertebrates’ DNA that don’t alter the sequence itself — epigenetic modifications. These allow an adult queen bee or adult shrimp to pass heightened disease resistance to their offspring.
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