Honeybee workers can flip back and forth between two careers, thanks to a small number of reversible epigenetic changes. Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and Arizona State University showed that the switch from young nurse bees, which stay in the hive to care for grubs, to older travelling foragers involves a set of epigenetic marks that affect how a small number of genes are used. And if the foragers change back into nurses, the marks revert, too.
The results, published today (September 16) in Nature Neuroscience, are the first to show that two patterns of behavior are associated with reversible epigenetic changes.
“Behavioral biologists talk readily about adaptive plastic behaviors that allow an organism to respond to its immediate environment,” said Seirian Sumner, a behavioral ecologist at the Institute of Zoology, London, who was not involved in the study. “This paper is the first step in exposing ...
