Featured Article Academic Journal Main Category: Biology / Biochemistry Also Included In: Diabetes;Obesity / Weight Loss / Fitness;Nutrition / Diet Article Date: 03 Jul 2012 - 3:00 PDT
Current ratings for: Honey Bees Reveal Link Between Sugar Sensitivity And Metabolic Disorders
Lead author Ying Wang, a research scientist, in the School of Life Sciences in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University (ASU), and colleagues, write about their findings in a paper published on 28 June in the open access journal PLoS Genetics.
Honey bees offer a useful model for studying what influences food-related behavior, such as the role of taste sensitivity in making choices between foods rich in carbohydrate and food rich in protein (for bees this is choosing between nectar and pollen).
A young bee's sensitivity to sugar predicts what she will forage for later in life, as Wang explained to the press:
"A bee's sensitivity to sugar reveals her attitude towards food, how old the bee is when she starts searching for nectar and pollen, and which kind of food she prefers to collect."
To study the processes that influence this, Wang and colleagues successfully inactivated two genes in the "master regulator" that controls the bees' food-related behavior.
When they did this, they discovered a possible molecular link between sweet taste perception and the state of internal energy.
"By suppressing these two 'master' genes, we discovered that bees can become more sensitive to sweet taste. But interestingly, those bees also had very high blood sugar levels, and low levels of insulin, much like people who have Type 1 diabetes," said Wang.
One of the genes they suppressed is called vitellogenin, which codes for a protein in the bee's fat cells and is similar to a human gene called apolipoprotein B. The other gene is called ultraspiracle, which partners with an insect hormone that has some functions in common with the human thyroid hormone.
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Honey Bees Reveal Link Between Sugar Sensitivity And Metabolic Disorders
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