Immediate early gene kakusei potentially plays a role in the daily foraging of honey bees.

Asem Surindro Singh,Marco Feligioni,Pamela Cappelletti,Machathoibi Chanu Takhellambam,James C Nieh

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0222256

Abstract

kakusei is a non-coding RNA that is overexpressed in foraging bee brain. This study describes a possible role of the IEG kakusei during the daily foraging of honey bees. kakusei was found to be transiently upregulated within two hours during rewarded foraging. Interestingly, during unrewarded foraging the gene was also found to be up-regulated, but immediately lowered when food was not rewarded. Moreover, the kakusei overexpression was diminished within a very short time when the time schedule of feeding was changed. This indicates the potential role of kakusei on the motivation of learned reward foraging. These results provide evidence for a dynamic role of kakusei during for aging of bees, and eventually its possible involvement in learning and memory. Thus the kakusei gene could be used as search tool in finding distinct molecular pathways that mediate diverse behavioral components of foraging.

Highlights

Social behavior of honey bee foraging has been an attractive field of research
This study describes a possible role of the immediate early genes (IEGs) kakusei during the daily foraging of honey bees. kakusei was found to be transiently upregulated within two hours during rewarded foraging
Keeping this idea as central, this study extends our recent report [12] on the search for immediate early genes (IEGs) that could be used as Immediate early gene kakusei potentially plays a role in the daily foraging of honey bees research tool for finding the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying social behavior using foraging of honey bees as model system

Summary

Introduction

Further exploration of the dynamics of honey bee foraging at the molecular and cellular level could help in uncovering the complex mechanisms of social behavior. In 1973 the Austrian ethologist Karl Ritter von Frisch (Austrian ethologist) was honored with Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his investigations of sensory perceptions in honey bees [1]. He translated the meaning of the bee waggle dance into a particular movement of the honey bee that looks like the form of figure eight, and revealed that foraging bees of the same colony share information with the help of this dance [2,3,4]. Understanding of the context of molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying foraging tasks is still poor

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