Immune pathways and defence mechanisms in honey bees Apis mellifera

By Jay D. Evans, K. Aronstein, Yanping Chen, C. Hétru, J. Imler, Haobo Jiang, M. Kanost, G. Thompson, Z. Zou, D. Hultmark. Insect molecular biology (Print), 2006

1,059 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social insects are able to mount both group‐level and individual defences against pathogens. Here we focus on individual defences, by presenting a genome‐wide analysis of immunity in a social insect, the honey bee Apis mellifera. We present honey bee models for each of four signalling pathways associated with immunity, identifying plausible orthologues for nearly all predicted pathway members. When compared to the sequenced Drosophila and Anopheles genomes, honey bees possess roughly one‐third as many genes in 17 gene families implicated in insect immunity. We suggest that an implied reduction in immune flexibility in bees reflects either the strength of social barriers to disease, or a tendency for bees to be attacked by a limited set of highly coevolved pathogens.

Subfields: Genetics, Insect Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/323ece9056ef7a1d81faf3422e98def1efd38f70

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Citations in the corpus

Encapsulation and nodulation in insects (2016, background): “Genome analyses have uncovered putative PRR genes in other model insect species, including Tenebrio molitor (Zhu et al., 2013), Apis mellifera (Evans et al., 2006) and Tribolium castaneum (Zou et al., 2007; Altincicek et al., 2013).”
Neonicotinoid clothianidin adversely affects insect immunity and promotes replication of a viral pathogen in honey bees (2013, background): “To test whether a similar negative impact of clothianidin on NFκB signaling occurs in bees, we monitored the transcription level of the gene encoding the antimicrobial peptide Apidaecin as a measure of Toll pathway activation (42).”
Phenoloxidase: a key component of the insect immune system (2012, background): “Researchers have found two or more proPO genes in most insect species, although there are a few cases, such as the honeybee, with only one proPO gene (Evans et al., 2006).”
Understanding the Effects of Sublethal Pesticide Exposure on Honey Bees: A Role for Probiotics as Mediators of Environmental Stress (2020, background): “…of detoxifying genes in the honey bee might stem from compensatory mechanisms associated with their highly social behavior, including herd immunity (Evans et al., 2006; Cremer et al., 2007) and a ‘social detoxification system,’ which focuses on how hive behavioral dynamics can reduce the burden of…”
Antimicrobial peptides: a key component of honey bee innate immunity (2015, background): “, thioester-containing proteins and AMPs) and secreted in response to microbial infections or septic wounding (Evans et al., 2006; Laughton, Boots, & Siva-Jothy, 2011; Turner, 1994).”
Diet effects on honeybee immunocompetence (2010, methodology): “To determine the haemocyte concentration, haemolymph was extracted with micro capillaries (10 ml) from the second abdominal tergite and diluted 1 : 5 in ice-cold phosphate-buffered saline (pH 7.4).”
Mutations in smooth muscle α-actin (ACTA2) lead to thoracic aortic aneurysms and dissections (2007, background): “melanogaster , Anopheles gambiae and Aedes aegypti and the hymenopteran Apis mellifera have revealed considerable variation in the size and diversity of immune-related gene familie”
Defensive microbial symbionts in Hymenoptera (2014, background): “Compared to other Hymenoptera and Diptera, honeybees possess a strongly reduced set of immune-related genes (Evans et al. 2006), which may be compensated by the presence of protective microbial symbionts, a strategy that has also been suggested for the pea aphid (Moran et al. 2005; Gerardo et al.…”
Personal immunity versus social immunity (2010, background): “There is circumstantial evidence for exactly this sort of relationship in honeybees who now possess many fewer genes for personal immunity than nonsocial insects and who instead bear genes for colony level immune function (Evans et al. 2006; Wilson-Rich et al. 2009).”
Characteristics of honey bee colonies (Apis mellifera) in Sweden surviving Varroa destructor infestation (2011, background): “At the individual level, the immune system of the European honey bee, Apis mellifera, is not welldeveloped compared with other insects (Evans et al. 2006), and rather, they rely heavily on colony-level adaptive mechanisms for defence.”
Uncovering the novel characteristics of Asian honey bee, Apis cerana, by whole genome sequencing (2015, methodology): “cerana genome by comparing genomic information to other sequenced insect genomes [96].”