The Cape honey bee and the origins of virgin birth

开普蜜蜂和处女生育的起源

• 批准号: DP210101084
• 负责人: Prof Benjamin Oldroyd
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: The University of Sydney
• 依托单位国家: 澳大利亚
• 项目类别: Discovery Projects
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 澳大利亚
• 起止时间: 2021-12-31 至 2022-01-24
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://dataportal.arc.gov.au/RGS/Web/Grants/DP210101084
• 关键词: Cape; honey; bee; origins; virgin

Using honeybees, the aim is to show how a mutation in a single gene creates a new species. This gene causes a shift from sexual to asexual reproduction, allowing workers to clone themselves (virgin birth), thus turning a formerly cooperative species into a social cancer. Observing a real-time speciation event driven by a single gene is an incredibly rare opportunity and enables this project to determine the socio-genetic mechanisms that reduce gene flow between neighbouring populations and to explain how expression of the gene is regulated. Further, because clonal reproduction often leads to invasiveness in social insects - a dangerous outcome - understanding the origins of virgin birth is also critical to understanding invasiveness.

利用蜜蜂，目的是展示单个基因的突变如何创造一个新物种。这种基因导致了从有性繁殖到无性繁殖的转变，使工人能够克隆自己(处女出生)，从而将一个以前合作的物种变成了社会癌症。观察由单个基因驱动的实时物种形成事件是一个令人难以置信的难得的机会，使该项目能够确定减少邻近种群之间基因流动的社会遗传机制，并解释基因的表达是如何受到调节的。此外，由于克隆繁殖经常导致群居昆虫的入侵--这是一个危险的结果--理解处女出生的起源对于理解入侵也是至关重要的。