https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/scicurious/methylation-turns-wannabe-bumblebee-queen
Entomologist Harindra Amarasinghe and colleagues at the University of
Leicester in England were interested in what makes some workers go
reproduction rogue. Their results,
published<http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/281/1780/20132502.full>
February
18 in the *Proceedings of the Royal Society B*, show that removing chemical
tags on a worker bee's DNA leads to aggressive bees that are more likely to
lay eggs of their own. The findings show an important role for epigenetics
in bumblebees, and suggest that whether a gene is turned off or on depends
on whether it comes from the father or the mother.
Amarasinghe and colleagues first looked at what happened when a queen bee
was taken away from the hive. Sure enough, some of the workers developed
into aggressive reproductive usurpers. When the scientists compared the
workers that started reproducing with those that didn't, they found that
the two groups had different patterns of gene methylation. Epigenetic
changes, such as chemical tags called methyl groups attached to a gene,
determine whether and how much of a gene is made into a protein. In this
case, the different patterns of methylation were associated with a more
aggressive, reproducing worker bee.
To determine whether methylation changes were actually causing the
difference in bee behavior, the scientists used the
drugdecitabine<https://www.sciencenews.org/article/old-cancer-drugs-offer-new-tricks>.
This drug is normally used to treat acute myeloid leukemia, and it works by
inhibiting the enzyme that puts methyl groups on DNA. When the leaderless
hives received decitabine in their nectar, the worker bees became much more
likely to develop ovaries and lay eggs. So changing methylation patterns in
the bumblebees directly affected their role in the hive.
Gene Robinson, a geneticist at the University of Illinois at
Urbana-Champaign, says that the paper "opens a new line of study on the
role of epigenetics in controlling reproductive conflict" in bumblebees.
David Haig, a biologist at Harvard University, agrees. "These are nice
results," he says, "and they show there's a methylation system present and
that genetic methylation is associated with differences in behavior and
development."
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