Robinson Gene E
Department of Entomology and Neuroscience Program, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
Am Nat. 2002 Dec;160 Suppl 6:S160-72. doi: 10.1086/342901.
One approach to understanding proximate and evolutionary mechanisms of social behavior is to analyze mechanisms of neural and behavioral plasticity and their underlying genes. This article deals with such analyses in the honeybee Apis mellifera. The first part reviews the control of age-related division of labor in honeybee colonies with special attention to social, endocrine, and neurochemical factors. The second part reviews progress in studying changes in gene expression that are associated with division of labor, including a brief description of a genomics project that involves a set of 20,000 expressed sequence tags from the honeybee brain and cDNA microarrays for large-scale gene expression analysis. The article concludes by considering some of the general issues associated with studies of genes and social behavior in honeybees.
理解社会行为的近因机制和进化机制的一种方法是分析神经和行为可塑性的机制及其潜在基因。本文探讨了蜜蜂（西方蜜蜂）中的此类分析。第一部分回顾了蜜蜂群体中与年龄相关的劳动分工的控制，特别关注社会、内分泌和神经化学因素。第二部分回顾了与劳动分工相关的基因表达变化研究的进展，包括对一个基因组学项目的简要描述，该项目涉及一组来自蜜蜂大脑的20000个表达序列标签以及用于大规模基因表达分析的cDNA微阵列。本文最后思考了一些与蜜蜂基因和社会行为研究相关的一般性问题。
