Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Av. Bandeirantes 3900, 14049-900, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
Departamento de Genética, Faculdade de Medicina de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Av. Bandeirantes 3900, 14049-900, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil; Departamento de Biologia, Faculdade de Filosofia, Ciências e Letras de Ribeirão Preto, Universidade de São Paulo, Av. Bandeirantes 3900, 14049-900, Ribeirão Preto, SP, Brazil.
Insect Biochem Mol Biol. 2022 Jul;146:103774. doi: 10.1016/j.ibmb.2022.103774. Epub 2022 Apr 22.
Pollinator populations, including bees, are in rapid decline in many parts of the world, raising concerns over the future of ecosystems and food production. Among the factors involved in these declines, poor nutrition deserves attention. The diet consumed by adult worker honeybees (Apis mellifera) is crucial for their behavioral maturation, i.e., the progressive division of labor they perform, such as nurse bees initially and later in life as foragers. Poor pollen nutrition is known to reduce the workers' lifespan, but the underlying physiological and genetic mechanisms are not fully understood. Here we investigate how the lack of pollen in the diet of workers during their first week of adult life can affect age-related phenotypes. During the first seven days of adult life, newly emerged workers were fed either a pollen-deprived (PD) diet mimicking that of an older bee, or a control pollen-rich (PR) diet, as typically consumed by young bees. The PD-fed bees showed alterations in their fat body transcriptome, such as a switch from a protein-lipid based metabolism to a carbohydrate-based metabolism, and a reduced expression of genes involved with immune response. The absence of pollen in the diet also led to an accumulation of oxidative stress markers in fat body tissue and alterations in the cuticular hydrocarbon profiles, which became similar to those of chronologically older bees. Together, our data indicate that the absence of pollen during first week of adulthood triggers the premature onset of an aging-related worker phenotype.
传粉媒介（包括蜜蜂）的数量在世界许多地区迅速减少，这引起了人们对生态系统和粮食生产未来的担忧。在导致这些减少的因素中，营养不良值得关注。成年工蜂（Apis mellifera）所消耗的饮食对于它们的行为成熟至关重要，即它们所执行的劳动分工逐渐细化，例如最初是护士蜂，后来是觅食蜂。众所周知，较差的花粉营养会降低工蜂的寿命，但其中的生理和遗传机制尚未完全了解。在这里，我们研究了在成年早期的第一周内，工蜂饮食中缺乏花粉会如何影响与年龄相关的表型。在成年后的头七天里，新出现的工蜂要么喂食缺乏花粉的饮食（PD），这种饮食模拟了老年蜜蜂的饮食，要么喂食富含花粉的对照饮食（PR），这是年轻蜜蜂通常所食用的饮食。PD 喂养的蜜蜂在其脂肪体转录组中表现出改变，例如从基于蛋白质-脂质的代谢转变为基于碳水化合物的代谢，以及参与免疫反应的基因表达减少。饮食中缺乏花粉也导致脂肪体组织中氧化应激标志物的积累和表皮碳氢化合物谱的改变，使其变得与年龄较大的蜜蜂相似。总的来说，我们的数据表明，在成年早期的第一周内缺乏花粉会引发与衰老相关的工蜂表型的过早出现。
