Research Initiation Award: Search for the Epigenomic Mechanisms of Paternal Inheritance of Aggression in Social Honeybees

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Research Initiation Awards provide support for junior and mid-career faculty at Historically Black Colleges and Universities who are building new research programs or redirecting and rebuilding existing programs. It is expected that the award helps to further the faculty member's research capability and effectiveness, improves research and teaching at the home institution, and involves undergraduate students in research experiences. The award to Central State University seeks to determine the epigenetic modifications and epigenomic architecture connecting aggressive behavior of honeybees to their sociogenome.To investigate the potential imprinting mechanisms via parental inheritance, the project will focus on the quantification analysis of epigenetic marks in the brain of Africanized and European honey bees. The use of modern epitranscriptomic and genomic approaches will reveal the molecular regulation of behavioral epigenomics. These studies will provide new insights and the first evidence of how epigenetic marks regulate or link to the process of transcription, gene regulation, or molecular evolution. A new field of behavioral epigenetics and epigenomics will also be developed using social honey bees as a model system.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.