drome (SARS) Coronavirus by a Loop-Mediated Isothermal Amplification Assay, Leo L.M. Poon, Cynthia S.W. Leung, Masato Tashiro, Kwok Hung Chan, Bonnie W.Y. Wong, Kwok Yung Yuen, Yi Guan, and Joseph S.M. Peiris ( Department of Microbiology, Queen Mary Hospital, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR; 2 Department of Viral Diseases and Vaccine Control, National Institute of Infectious Diseases, Mu...

role of vitamins in bee nutrition is very important especially in case of supplemental feeding with sugar and pollen substitutes. in this experiment effects of different levels of vitamin c on the rate of queen lying and workers body protein were studied. experimental colonies had the same age queens and the same population (5 frames). this study was held at april and july 2011 in three levels ...

The female sex in honeybees (Apis spp.) comprises a reproductive queen and a sterile worker caste. Nurse bees feed all larvae progressively with a caste-specific food jelly until the prepupal stage. Only those larvae that are exclusively fed a large amount of royal jelly (RJ) develop into queens [1]. RJ is a composite secretion of two specialized head glands: the mandibular glands, which produc...

Recent advances in quantitative single-cell analysis revealed large diversity in gene expression levels between individual cells, which could affect the physiology and/or fate of each cell. In contrast, for most metabolites, the concentrations were only measureable as ensemble averages of many cells. In living cells, adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a critically important metabolite that powers ...

In host-parasite systems, dominant host types are expected to be eventually replaced by other hosts due to the elevated potency of their specific parasites. This leads to changes in the abundance of both hosts and parasites exhibiting cycles of alternating dominance called Red Queen dynamics. Host-parasite models with less than three hosts and parasites have been demonstrated to exhibit Red Que...

While adaptive adjustment of sex ratio in the function of colony kin structure and food availability commonly occurs in social Hymenoptera, long-term studies have revealed substantial unexplained between-year variation in sex ratio at the population level. In order to identify factors that contribute to increased between-year variation in population sex ratio, we conducted a comparative analysi...

Colonies of eusocial Hymenoptera, such as ants, bees and wasps, have long been recognized as candidates for the study of genomic imprinting on the grounds of evolutionary conflicts that arise from close interactions among colony members and relatedness asymmetry owing to haplodiploidy. Although a general kinship theory of genomic imprinting predicts its occurrence under various circumstances of...

Social insects are promising model systems for epigenetics due to their immense morphological and behavioral plasticity. Reports that DNA methylation differs between the queen and worker castes in social insects [1-4] have implied a role for DNA methylation in regulating division of labor. To better understand the function of DNA methylation in social insects, we performed whole-genome bisulfit...

P. Read Montague, Raymond J. Dolan, Karl J. Friston and Peter Dayan 1 Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute and Department of Physics, Virginia Tech, 2 Riverside Circle, Roanoke, VA 24016, USA 2 Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, 12 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3BG, UK 3 Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, Alexandra House, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK

Due to their haplo-diploid sex determination system and the resulting conflict over optimal sex allocation between queens and workers, social Hymenoptera have become important model species to study variation in sex allocation. While many studies indeed reported sex allocation to be affected by social factors such as colony kin structure or queen number, others, however, found that sex allocati...