Amdam lab, School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University
Our central objective is to understand the role of insulin/insulin-like signaling (IIS) and TOR (target of rapamycin) pathways in honey bee (Apis mellifera) social organization. The IIS and TOR signaling are conserved integrators of nutritional information in regulation of growth and reproduction, and this control includes hormonal and growth factor responses. In collaboration with the group of Dr. Robert E. Page we have proposed an evolutionary framework called the Reproductive Ground Plan Hypothesis, which outlines how adoption of such gene regulatory networks allowed social life to emerge from solitary lineages (PDF format). Recently, with the help of QTL (Quantitative Trait Loci) mapping studies carried out by our collaborators, we demonstrated that genes involved in IIS and TOR signaling are indeed candidates for regulation of honey bee social organization (PDF format). Our studies now focus on the examination of the effects of these regulators with advanced tools that include RNA interference (RNAi) and quantitative proteomics. Our work is facilitated by select honey bee strains developed by Dr. Robert E. Page and M. Kim Fondrk: one that tends to store large amounts of pollen (high pollen-hoarding strain), and one that stores little pollen (low pollen-hoarding strain). These two strains are exemplars of highly divergent social life history syndromes. These syndromes appear to derive from reproductive regulatory networks, and are found equally in unselected worker bees (wild type), and as racial differences between A. mellifera subspecies.
