Johnny Bee Good: Bees as Models to Study the Hijacking of the Reward System

摘要 大脑中调节我们对奖赏感知的回路，统称为奖赏系统 将快乐与生活必需品结合起来：食物和繁殖。奖励制度也是 我们社会中一些最悲惨、最有害、最昂贵的行为。这些包括对物质的上瘾 虐待、肥胖相关行为、危险的寻求刺激行为和反常的性行为。研究表明，我 对蜜蜂的利他主义行为的研究让我对奖励制度有了新的认识。查找 在独居昆虫身上调节自私行为的神经化学系统也会调节利他主义 在高度社会化的蜜蜂的行为中，我得出结论，不仅奖励系统容易受到劫持-- -与具有负面后果的刺激相结合--如上所述，在一生中，但它也 在进化时代很容易被劫持。我建议使用经济体技术(高吞吐量 测序、转录组学、表观基因组学、蛋白质组学和代谢组学)以分子术语理解 如何改变奖励体系，从自私行为转变为利他行为。这些分析将在 精心挑选的一组密切相关的蜜蜂物种，一些群居(具有利他行为)和一些独居 (没有)。从这一系统生物学、神经科学和进化论的新综合中获得的见解 生物学将改变我们对药物成瘾和其他疾病的奖励系统的理解，并提供 为新形式的治疗干预奠定了基础。

Abstract The circuits in the brain that mediate our perception of reward, known collectively as the ¿reward system,¿ couple pleasure with the essentials of life: food and reproduction. The reward system also lies at the root of some of the most tragic, harmful, and costly behaviors in our society. These include addiction to substances of abuse, obesity-related behavior, dangerous thrill seeking behavior, and aberrant sexual behavior. Research that I performed on altruistic behavior in honey bees has led me to a new insight about the reward system. Finding that the same neurochemical system that modulates selfish behavior in solitary insects modulates altruistic behavior in the highly social honey bee, I conclude that not only is the reward system vulnerable to ¿hijacking¿- -coupling to stimuli with negative consequences-- over the course of a lifetime as mentioned above, but it also is vulnerable to hijacking in evolutionary time. I propose to use ¿omic technologies (high-throughput sequencing, transcriptomics, epigenomics, proteomics, and metabolomics) to understand in molecular terms how to ¿flip¿ the reward system, from selfish to altruistic behavior. These analyses will be performed on a carefully selected set of closely related species of bees, some social (with altruistic behavior) and some solitary (without). The insights gained from this novel synthesis of systems biology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology will transform our understanding of drug addiction and other diseases of the reward system and provide the foundation for new forms of therapeutic intervention.