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Bees have a sort of collective immune systemAmornrut Ploysangam/EyeEm/Getty
By Michael Le PageBee colonies are even more of a superorganism than we thought. When disease strikes, bees can add immunity-providing molecules to the jellies they feed to larvae, to give the hive a kind of collective immune system.
A decade ago, Eyal Maori at Cambridge University and colleagues tested a new way of treating diseases in bees. The treatment was based on a technique RNA interference, which involves feeding the bees double-stranded RNA molecules that shut down specific genes. Many insects naturally produce these double-stranded RNA molecules as an immune response to infections by viruses, bacteria or fungi.
The treatment worked, but strangely kept on working for months, even after the bees fed the RNAs were dead, suggesting the protection was somehow being passed on to young bees.
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Now investigating this further, Maori and his team found that bees pass RNAs on to other bees by adding them to the worker and royal jellies that they secrete to feed larvae. What’s more, bees produce special proteins that bind to RNAs to protect the molecules and prevent them from breaking down.
This is the first time that individuals of the same species have been shown to exchange RNA in this way, says Maori.
When the team sequenced the natural RNAs in the jellies, they found RNAs corresponding to ten viruses, suggesting that bees start making and sharing disease-targeting RNAs when infections strike.
Bees may use RNAs for more than defence. The team suspect that they are the key ingredient in the royal jelly that makes larvae turn into queens rather than workers.
Bees may also use RNAs to prepare future generations for the specific environment they will face. “This could be a form of social epigenetics,” Maori says.
Many other insects, but not other animals such as mammals, also take up double-stranded RNAs from the food they eat. This phenomenon has led to the development of RNAi-based pesticides that kill only the target species.
Journal reference: Cell Reports, DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2019.04.073
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