DRiveR · How does dopamine link QMP with reproductive repression to mediate colony harmony and productivity in the honeybee?
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-03-01 → 2020-02-29
- EU contribution
- €183,455
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
How does dopamine link QMP with reproductive repression to mediate colony harmony and productivity in the honeybee?
The honeybee is the most important managed pollinator species globally. Honeybees are extremely efficient pollinators, at least in part because of their unusual life-history. Honeybees live in large colonies and each colony has only one reproductive female, the other bees are also all females – but are kept from reproducing by the presence of a queen and her pheromone (Queen Mandibular Pheromone, QMP). This reproductive division of labour is integral to the success of honeybee colonies and crucial for ensuring food-security through maintaining pollinator capacity. Yet we don’t really have a good understanding of how QMP represses reproduction in honeybee workers, nor the role of this repression in maximising colony productivity. This project aimed to determine whether dopamine (a biogenic amine) links the brain and ovary with exposure to QMP in the honeybee. This project also sought to determine whether environmental perturbations, such as exposure to pesticides disrupts this signalling leading to a problem in a honeybee colony and possibly contributing to colony declines. The objectives of this project were to determine how dopamine links the brain and ovary in the worker honeybee mediating responsiveness to QMP and define what role this pathway has in maintaining colony harmony and maximising colony productivity. To achieve this the project proposed three specific objectives; 1. How does dopamine link reproduction with QMP in the worker honeybee? 2. Is dopamine signalling responsible for establishing individual variation response to QMP 3. Is dopamine-signalling integral for colony productivity and is it resilient to environmental perturbation?
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Insects pollinate 80% of crop plants in Europe and pollination services contribute €22 billion to the European economy annually. The honeybee (Apis mellifera) is the most extensively managed pollinator species, yet populations are declining. Understanding the biology of the honeybee and and factors contributing to its decline is critical for food security and maintenance of biodiversity. The honeybee has evolved a remarkable life history strategy where only one female is responsible for the majority of reproduction. The other females, the workers, forgo reproducing to care for the queen and her offspring. The presence of a reproductive queen is communicated via pheromones, arguably the most important of which is Queen Mandibular Pheromone (QMP). This pheromone inhibits ovary activity in worker bees and in its absence worker bees can activate their ovaries and lay unfertilised eggs that will become males. QMP is detected by the antennae and brain, but it is not currently known how the signal, initiated by QMP, is passed to the ovary. In this fellowship the applicant will address this fundamental gap in our knowledge by testing her hypothesis that dopamine acts to link the brain and ovary with exposure to QMP in the honeybee. The applicant will determine the role of dopamine signalling in maximising colony productivity and harmony and whether this is altered by sub-lethal doses of neonicotinoid pesticides. The experimental approach proposed in this fellowship is highly innovative as it combines state-of-the-art techniques both for measuring gene expression (RNA-seq) and for ovary culture and transplantation in honeybees. The applicant will combine these molecular approaches with behavioural ecology and colony monitoring (new skills that she will acquire under this fellowship) to understand not just how cells within the honeybee ovary respond to QMP, but how this signal affects the whole animal, its behaviour and, ultimately, the performance of the colony.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS · LeedsCoordinatorUnited Kingdom
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union