Abstract
Bees are by far the most important pollinators in both natural and agricultural ecosystems, and the recent decline of their populations poses a major threat to this equilibrium. A promising strategy to overcome or at least diminish this risk is the mass rearing of these pollinators by means of rational management techniques. These, however, require profound knowledge on these organisms in terms of systems biology. Although since decades honey bees are well studied and figure as a model organism for behavioral plasticity, communication, learning and memory, important aspects of their biology are still little understood. The thousands of individuals that compose a colony show coordinated behavior and a highly sophisticated organization, wherein a single queen, a female tuned to high reproductive output, produces some eggs that give rise to males, an even a lesser number of eggs that will develop into female reproductives, whilst the overwhelming majority of the her eggs will give rise to workers. These workers are facultatively sterile females which have a well developed nervous system essential facing complex cognitive challenges to which queens are not exposed. The aims of this project are to provide insights into the developmental biology of bees by means of state-of-the-art protocols of Genetics and Molecular Biology, as well as to understand the flux of this information through hierarchical regulatory networks of gene expression. Such state-of-the-art tools are: Next Generation Sequencing, ab initio analysis of the A. mellifera genome, especially of regulatory RNAs, analyses of gene expression through microarrays, as well as functional approaches, such as RNA interference, in situ hybridization and immunohistochemistry. All results should finally serve to construct gene regulatory networks. (AU)
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