February 11th & 18th:

SNACKS & Who is Who: by Karl and Madeline

BEHAVIOR TOPIC # 1: Mara and Nick

Behavior pap: Wang Y, Kaftanogulu O, Fondrk MK, Page RE (2014) Nurse bee behaviour manipulates worker honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) reproductive development. Animal Behaviour 92:253e261

Genomics paper: Wheeler MM, Ament S, Rodrigues-Za SL, Southey B, Robinson GE (2015) Diet and endocrine effects on behavioral maturation-related gene expression in the pars intercerebralis of the honey bee brain. Journal of Experimental Biology 218:4005-4014.

Questions for reading (students must turn in 4 sets throughout semester):

Make a list of terms that are new to you and do some research to understand them better.

Be sure you understand the tables and figures.
In table1, 62 genes are regulated by diet in Ctrl and 73 are regulated by diet in JHA treated animals, but there are only 17 genes that show a statistically significant interaction of diet and JH. What does this tell you about the predominant patterns for gene expression? Similarly, there is only 1 gene that shows a statistically significant main effect of diet.

What is the take home message from figure 2B? If the two studies showed perfectly correlated results, what would this figurelook like? What factors might be contributing to the lack of correlation?

JH is manipulated in these experiments so it is important to know JH signaling?
      What factors influence JH level?
      What effect does JH's have on behavior?

Differential gene expression
How do the authors determine what genes are differentially expressed? Is it different for RNAseq analysis and microarray analysis?

Functional Analysis
What is GO analysis?
What is a cis-motif and how do they identify them?

List some major differences between the two honey bee papers we read.
     setup,
    methods
    conclusions

Rationale:
The authors focus on the effect of protein manipulation in the diet of the bees, which they found to have minimal effect while they discuss more pronounced effects of sugar starvation on behavior. So why did they only look at protein and what would you expect if they manipulated sugars instead?

WHY?
Why study the gemonic mechanisms underlying bee behavioral maturation and strain effects of high vs. low pollen hoarding?