Methylation and worker reproduction in the bumble-bee (Bombus terrestris)

Insects are at the dawn of an epigenetics era. Numerous social insect species have been found to possess a functioning methylation system, previously not thought to exist in insects. Methylation, an epigenetic tag, may be vital for the sociality and division of labour for which social insects are renowned. In the bumble-bee Bombus terrestris, we found methylation differences between the genomes of queenless reproductive workers and queenless non-reproductive workers. In a follow up experiment, queenless workers whose genomes had experimentally altered methylation were more aggressive and more likely to develop ovaries compared with control queenless workers. This shows methylation is important in this highly plastic reproductive division of labour. Methylation is an epigenetic tag for genomic imprinting (GI). It is intriguing that the main theory to explain the evolution of GI predicts that GI should be important in this worker reproduction behaviour.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

• Publication date

  2014-04-07

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Environmental Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1098/rspb.2013.2502PMID 24523266PMCID 4027386
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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