Investigation of the mevalonate pathway role in the ovaries of honey bees and stingless bees.

• Grant number: 23/12693-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: January 01, 2024
• End date: December 31, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Zoology - Physiology of Recent Groups
• Principal Investigator: Flávia Cristina de Paula Freitas
• Grantee: Bruna da Silva dos Santos
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde (CCBS). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 20/13719-7 - Genomic signatures of plasticity and diversity in the phenotypic development, AP.JP

Abstract

This project aims to investigate the role of the mevalonate pathway in the activation of ovaries in honey bees and stingless bees. Eusocial bees have a complex social structure, with division of reproductive labor between queens and workers. In Apis mellifera bees, the queen receives a food rich in sugar and develops functional ovaries and produces many eggs, while the workers have inactive ovaries. The presence of the queen and her pheromone keeps the worker ovaries inactive, but in her absence, they can be activated, allowing the workers to produce haploid eggs. In stingless bees, the reproductive capacity of workers varies widely. Some, such as Frieseomelitta varia, are permanently sterile, while others, such as Melipona quadrifasciata, have active ovaries and can produce eggs even in the presence of the queen. This project will focus on the mevalonate pathway, a metabolic route present in many organisms, including bees, which produces juvenile hormone. This hormone plays a crucial role in regulating reproduction in insects, but in honey bees, its presence does not appear to affect the reproductive capacity of workers. However, preliminary results indicate that genes from the mevalonate pathway are more expressed in worker ovaries in the process of activation. This suggests that this pathway plays a role in ovarian activation in honey bees. With this project we plan to evaluate the expression of these genes in different states of activation in the ovaries of workers and queens of Apis mellifera and in the ovaries of adult workers of F.varia and M. quadrifasciata, which differ in terms of their reproductive capacity.