Honey Bee Genome Sequenced

Finding may offer insight into bee behavior, even allergic disease.

By Steven Reinberg
HealthDay Reporter
Wednesday, October 25, 2006; 12:00 AM

Copyright © 2006 ScoutNews LLC. All rights reserved.

WEDNESDAY, Oct. 25 (HealthDay News) -- Scientists have decoded the genomic structure of the western honey bee, a finding that will give new insight into how these bees behave and where they came from.

So why should the average person care?

"Honey bees are the premier pollinators on Earth and play a vital role in our nation's economy and food supply," study co-author Gene Robinson, the G. William Arends Professor of Integrative Biology in the department of entomology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said in a prepared statement. "Honey bees account for $10 billion to $20 billion of food produced in America alone, per year."

Honey bees are also valuable to scientists as models for research organisms, added Robinson, who's director of the university's Bee Research Facility. "In biology and biomedicine, honey bees are used to study many diverse areas, including allergic disease, development, gerontology, neuroscience, social behavior and venom toxicology," he said. "Because they live in intricate societies, we can view the traits that honey bees exhibit through a prism of extreme sociality."

Added study co-author Richard Gibbs, director of the Human Genome Sequencing Center at Baylor College of Medicine: "There has been an interest in the honey bee as a scientific curiosity, because in addition to its agricultural importance and its role in human health, it has this elaborate social organization. The structure of the bee colony is of interest because of what it might tell us about human behavior."

The report is published in the Oct. 26 issue of Nature. In addition, a paper in the Oct. 27 issue of Science found that the regulation of genes in honey bees is more like the gene regulation of mammals, including humans, than it is like other insects, such as fruit flies.

Now that the honey bee gene sequence is known, it may be possible to see how genes evolved to account for bee behavior, Gibbs said. "We can begin to untangle the mystery of how these insects develop into this complex structure," he said. "It turns out that the honey bee is a little closer to us than other insects that have been analyzed. That's a surprise."