A new study of the Institute of Evolutionary Genetics in the University of Duesseldorf in Germany has unlocked the science behind the honeybees’ sex-determination by analyzing its DNA.
According to the study, the first scientist to look into this question is the Silesian monk Johann Dzierson. Dzierson tried to found out how a honeybee colony differentiates the male workers from the rest of the colony, such as from the queen, the nurses, and the worker bees.
It turned out that the answer lies on genetic development as proven by the 14 natural sequence variants of complementary sex determining switch gene that the researchers analysed. The gene was isolated from 76 genotypes of honeybees.
The researchers first identified the gene map of the honeybee species to isolate the sex determining locus. A locus is the position of a specific DNA carrying the chromosomes. After that, they determined that the honeybee’s recombination rate is the highest among species whose gene maps were already done. Recombination rate refers to the process by which two genetic materials join to form a new one during sexual reproduction.
The high recombination rate for honeybees allowed the researchers to find out the reproduction sequence and to single out the complementary sexual determination locus. Additionally, the researchers also discovered that genetic recombination is sometimes affected by an allele and that the male honeybees are usually a product of a diploid genotype.
Allele is an alternative type of gene which plays an important role in the gene recombination process and some questions about how allele affects the sequence for honeybees remain unanswered. This prompted the researchers to review their work and focus more on the identified alleles. Specifically, they aim to figure out what an allele is to the honeybee’s genotype and how it can affect the whole sexual determination process.
Page and Martin Baye, the study leaders for this research found that that there are amino acids that have influence on the allele present in the genotype of honeybees. Arginine, proline, and serine were discovered to affect protein-building areas on the sexual determination gene, therefore creating varying conformational sites. These sites then lead to different bodily changes in the bees, particularly the switch of gender from female to non-female.
The results of the study were published in the December issue of Current Biology.
