Bulletin

Issue: May 2006

News

Lessons from ‘switched on’ queen bees

A La Trobe honours student is working with Federation Fellow, Professor David Vaux, to find out how queen bees maintain their youth.

Sam Dyer’s work represents a new line of investigation for Professor vaux since moving to La Trobe. it builds on a tradition of honey bee research at the University and relates to Professor vaux’s lifelong interest in cell death.

Queen and worker bees are both females and carry the same complement of genes. But they have very different life histories. Whereas workers are sterile and rarely live beyond six weeks, the lifespan of the larger, fertile queens can be up to six years.

The researchers first looked to see whether the extended life of the queens is due to replacement of their cells with newly divided ones, or because the individual cells of the queens have a longer lifespan than those of the workers. To do so, they injected queens with a Dna analogue that is incorporated into the Dna when cells divide.

They found that the only cells actively replicating in queen bees were in their ovaries, as one would expect in a fertile female. because none of the other cells had divided, it appears that all the other cells were long-lived. and that implies that the queens possess an intracellular maintenance system which is not switched on in the workers.

Professor vaux says the genes encoding the molecular mechanism of such a system could well have relatives in mammals that work to prevent and patch up damage in cells, and generally maintain them. if so, future research to reveal how the system works could have useful medical spinoffs.