Institute of Apicultural Research/Key Laboratory of Pollinating Insect Biology, Ministry of Agriculture, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, Beijing, China.
Department of Biology, University of North Carolina Greensboro, Greensboro, United States.
Elife. 2021 Mar 24;10:e64830. doi: 10.7554/eLife.64830.
Behavioral specialization is key to the success of social insects and leads to division of labor among colony members. Response thresholds to task-specific stimuli are thought to proximally regulate behavioral specialization, but their neurobiological regulation is complex and not well understood. Here, we show that response thresholds to task-relevant stimuli correspond to the specialization of three behavioral phenotypes of honeybee workers in the well-studied and important and . Quantitative neuropeptidome comparisons suggest two tachykinin-related peptides (TRP2 and TRP3) as candidates for the modification of these response thresholds. Based on our characterization of their receptor binding and downstream signaling, we confirm a functional role of tachykinin signaling in regulating specific responsiveness of honeybee workers: TRP2 injection and RNAi-mediated downregulation cause consistent, opposite effects on responsiveness to task-specific stimuli of each behaviorally specialized phenotype but not to stimuli that are unrelated to their tasks. Thus, our study demonstrates that TRP signaling regulates the degree of task-specific responsiveness of specialized honeybee workers and may control the context specificity of behavior in animals more generally.
行为特化是社会性昆虫成功的关键，导致了群体成员之间的分工。人们认为，对特定任务刺激的反应阈值可近端调节行为特化，但它们的神经生物学调节非常复杂，尚未得到很好的理解。在这里，我们表明，对与任务相关刺激的反应阈值与三种行为表型的蜜蜂工蜂的特化相对应，这三种行为表型在经过充分研究的重要和中得到了体现。定量神经肽组比较表明，两种速激肽相关肽（TRP2 和 TRP3）可能是调节这些反应阈值的候选物质。基于我们对其受体结合和下游信号的描述，我们证实了速激肽信号在调节特定蜜蜂工蜂响应性方面的功能作用：TRP2 注射和 RNAi 介导的下调导致对每种行为特化表型的特定任务刺激的响应性发生一致的、相反的影响，但对与其任务无关的刺激没有影响。因此，我们的研究表明，TRP 信号调节了专门化的蜜蜂工蜂对特定任务响应的程度，并可能控制了更广泛意义上动物行为的上下文特异性。
