" 73 genes tentatively associated with hygienic behavior"
When this paper talks about 73 genes they are talking about 73 coding genes. The problem is that the important genetics for a considerable portion or perhaps even most hygienic behavior is NOT coding genes, rather it is non-coding genes.    It is real easy to look at a DNA sequence and identify coding genes.  Well, usually it is easy except when it is hard.  That hard part is why we still do not have a solid count on the number of coding genes even in humans.  At the current state of knowledge it is impossible to look at a DNA sequence and identify non-coding genes.  But, we do know that as a general statement there are several non-coding genes for each coding gene and those non-coding genes can be millions of bases away from the coding gene they regulate.  In fact, just like with coding genes a non-coding gene mutant can be a deletion.  How do you recognize the absence of 20,000 bases of non-coding DNA as functioning as a gene just by looking at the sequence information?  So knowing 73 genes that map to that behavior tells you little of use.  It sounds impressive.  But the information content is pretty low.  This information is based on data from drones so although they sequenced 125 individuals those individuals are haploid and they only used three breeding lines of bees, two selected for hygienic behavior and one non selected.  This very limited number of lines likely means some real important genetics was totally missed.  It is nice to see they did use the new long read technology so avoided at least some of the pitfalls unique to honey bees using the older short read shot gun methods.  I would say this paper is a nice first experiment on a project that might take another ten or 25 papers to wrap up. Nothing at all wrong with the paper as long as you realize it is sort of a range finding type experiment.  The good news is hygienic behavior did not map to 1500 places.  So, the problem might be small enough to be practical to go forward.  It would have been nice if the behavior only mapped to six or ten regions.  That would have gotten the problem down to the size a single PhD thesis might have gotten most of the questions answered.

Dick

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