Gro Amdam is a biologist stemming from Norway. She is known internationally for her research on the behavior and aging in honeybees. She uses honey bees in her lab to study the origins of social behavior. She investigates the honeybee social structure in an effort to understand how social behavior evolved from ancestral solitary forms of life. She has expanded this research to aging and epigenetics as she and her research team gained a better understanding of honey bee social behavior. It is important to have more information on how behavior affects, and is affected by, the social environment, as well as identifying and studying biological mechanisms that can explain differences in the social aspects of behavioral efforts, relationships, and
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Antioxidants have vital functions that they perform that include, but are not limited to, the reduction of life-shortening oxidative damage. Using Honey bee genome sequence it was discovered that there were 38 antioxidants that have all the key components of the enzymatic antioxidants system³. The comparison of the study with Drosophila melanogaster and Anopheles gambiae shows that though there are basic components of the antioxidant system that are conserved, there are important and key species difference in the paralogs³.Some of these key components that are different include the duplication of thioredoxin reductase and the expansion of the thioredoxin family in a fly, deficiency of expansion of the Theta, Deta, and Omega GST classes in a bee, and lastly no expansion of the Sigma class in dipterian species³. The differing properties of expansion of antioxidant gene families with bees and dipterian species might indicate the distinct differences in life history and ecological division between social and reclusive …show more content…
Insect immune systems are highly adept, they can recognize specific pathogens and prime offspring immunity⁴. This high specifying of immune priming can be reached when female insects transfer immune elictors into developing oocytes. This transfer is a phenomenon that has yet to be explained. She and her research team founded that the egg-yolk protein vitellogenin is the carrier of immune elictors⁴. She and her team used honey bee model system, and demonstrated with microscopy and western blotting that vitellogenin binds to bacteria, in Paenibacillus larve, which is the gram positive bacteria found in foulbrood disease, and also Escherichia coli, which is the negative bacteria. Her and her team then validated that vitellogenin binds to pathogen-associated molecular patterns, such as zymosan, lipopolysaccharide, and peptidoglycan, using surface plasmon resonance⁵. Her studies found that vitellogenin is necessary for transport of cell-wall pieces of Escherichia coli into eggs by imaging tissue sections. Her studies also concluded that vitellogenin, which is broadly distributed in oviparous species, as the carrier of immune-priming signals⁵. All of these studies results explain molecularly the trans-generational immunity in insects and the mysterious role that vitellogenin has in
Antioxidants have vital functions that they perform that include, but are not limited to, the reduction of life-shortening oxidative damage. Using Honey bee genome sequence it was discovered that there were 38 antioxidants that have all the key components of the enzymatic antioxidants system³. The comparison of the study with Drosophila melanogaster and Anopheles gambiae shows that though there are basic components of the antioxidant system that are conserved, there are important and key species difference in the paralogs³.Some of these key components that are different include the duplication of thioredoxin reductase and the expansion of the thioredoxin family in a fly, deficiency of expansion of the Theta, Deta, and Omega GST classes in a bee, and lastly no expansion of the Sigma class in dipterian species³. The differing properties of expansion of antioxidant gene families with bees and dipterian species might indicate the distinct differences in life history and ecological division between social and reclusive …show more content…
Insect immune systems are highly adept, they can recognize specific pathogens and prime offspring immunity⁴. This high specifying of immune priming can be reached when female insects transfer immune elictors into developing oocytes. This transfer is a phenomenon that has yet to be explained. She and her research team founded that the egg-yolk protein vitellogenin is the carrier of immune elictors⁴. She and her team used honey bee model system, and demonstrated with microscopy and western blotting that vitellogenin binds to bacteria, in Paenibacillus larve, which is the gram positive bacteria found in foulbrood disease, and also Escherichia coli, which is the negative bacteria. Her and her team then validated that vitellogenin binds to pathogen-associated molecular patterns, such as zymosan, lipopolysaccharide, and peptidoglycan, using surface plasmon resonance⁵. Her studies found that vitellogenin is necessary for transport of cell-wall pieces of Escherichia coli into eggs by imaging tissue sections. Her studies also concluded that vitellogenin, which is broadly distributed in oviparous species, as the carrier of immune-priming signals⁵. All of these studies results explain molecularly the trans-generational immunity in insects and the mysterious role that vitellogenin has in