Abstract
Diet plays a unique role in the development of honeybees. Larvae fed honey develop into worker bees, and larvae fed royal jelly develop into queens. We hypothesized that the binding of biotin to histones is an important epigenetic mechanism contributing towards bee development. First, we demonstrated that the biotin content in royal jelly (45 ± 9.3 nM) is significantly greater than in honey (1.7 ± 0.6 nM). Second we screened various tissues from bees with site‐specific antibodies to various histone biotinylation marks. Lysine‐9 methylated histone H3 (H3K9bio) was easily detectable; highest concentrations were observed in bee brain. The abundance of H3K9bio was about three times greater in brain from queens compared with workers. Currently, we are conducting biotin intervention studies to determine whether dietary biotin can cause shifts in the bee populations that develop into queens and larvae, and chromatin immunoprecipitation assays to identify genomic loci where H3K9bio is enriched in bee brains. Collectively, this study is consistent with the hypothesis that biotinylation of histones occurs in bees; that H3K9bio is the predominant biotinylation mark in bees; and that biotin plays a role in bee development. (Supported by UNL ARD Hatch Act funds, NIH DK063945, DK077816, DK082476 and ES015206, USDA CSREES 2006‐35200‐17138, and NSF EPSCoR EPS‐0701892.)
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