23 and bee: Molecular medicine for early and effective diagnostics and monitoring of honeybee health

大规模农业依赖昆虫授粉服务，在英国每年价值超过4.3亿英镑：商业授粉支撑着大多数主要水果和坚果作物的生产。此外，昆虫传粉者确保生态系统的稳定性，87%的开花植物需要授粉才能繁殖。蜜蜂提供了大部分的授粉。然而，每年有15%到40%的蜂箱丢失，这给养蜂人带来了巨大的成本，也给农产品加工业带来了重大挑战。疾病是罪魁祸首。事实上，保持蜂群健康和防止感染某些蜂群的病原体传播到其他蜂群是大规模和小规模养蜂人面临的持续挑战。因此，他们定期对蜂箱进行劳动密集型检查--在里面寻找不同疾病的特征症状。然而，这是不够的：视觉诊断缺乏灵敏度或准确性，或无法识别多种感染。此外，治疗很难剂量或监测-他们可能会恶化的事情。对病原体进行准确的早期检测和监测可以显著减少治疗需求，显著减少交叉感染，从而显著减少菌落损失。分子医学方法可以为每个样本提供数百万个测量结果-而不是通过传统方法获得的少数测量结果-极大地改善了医学研究和实践（Curtis et al 2014，柯林斯& Varmus 2015，Costello et al 2014）。我们的目标是同样利用这些方法来开发一种新的和敏感的方法来监测蜜蜂的健康。我们将开发和实施一种方法，使养蜂人可以张贴蜜蜂进行测试，并迅速获得她的分子健康的概述。由此产生的蜜蜂在线“分子健康仪表板”将提供以下信息：存在的病原体和寄生虫（及其菌株）的概述（例如，病毒、微孢子虫等）;肠道细菌概述;基于3种蜜蜂组织中10，000个基因的活性水平与健康蜜蜂广泛样本的活性水平的比较，概述了生理健康。例如，这将表明蜜蜂是否在免疫或解毒功能上投入了异常量的能量。我们的目标是提供一种简单的方法，以低成本的方式持续监测蜂群健康，只需很少的劳动力，并提供对蜂巢健康的高分辨率洞察。这将提供一个强有力的工具，用于定期检测、取代或指导传统的健康评估方法、就治疗作出知情决定并监测其疗效。

Large-scale agriculture depends on insect pollination services valued at over £430 million annually in the UK: commercial pollination underpins the production of most major fruit and nut crops. Furthermore, insect pollinators ensure ecosystem stability, with 87% of flowering plants requiring pollination for reproduction. Honeybees provide most of this pollination. However, 15 to 40% of bee hives are lost every year.This creates huge costs for beekeepers, and a major challenge for agroindustry. Diseases are the major culprit. Indeed, keeping colonies healthy and preventing pathogens infecting some colonies from spreading to others are ongoing challenges for large- and small-scale beekeepers. They thus regularly perform labour-intense check-ups of their hives - looking inside for characteristic symptoms of different diseases. However, this is insufficient: visual diagnostics lack sensitivity or accuracy, or cannot identify multiple infections. Furthermore, treatments are difficult to dose or to monitor - they can worsen things. Accurate early detection and monitoring of pathogens could significantly reduce the need for treatment, significantly reduce cross-infection, and thus significantly reduce colony losses.Molecular medicine approaches that provide millions of measurements per sample - rather than the handful obtained through traditional approaches - have dramatically improved medical research and practise (Curtis et al 2014, Collins & Varmus 2015, Costello et al 2014). We aim to similarly harness such approaches to develop a new and sensitive approach for monitoring bee health.We will develop and implement an approach that makes it possible for a beekeeper to post a bee for testing and rapidly obtain an overview of her molecular health. The resulting online "molecular health dashboard" for the bee will provide information including:Overviews of the pathogens and parasites (and their strains) present (e.g., Viruses, Nosema etc);Overview of gut bacteria;Overviews of physiological health based on comparison of the activity levels of 10,000 genes in 3 bee tissues to those of a broad sampling of healthy bees. This will indicate, for example, whether the bee is investing an abnormal amount of energy on immune- or detoxification functions.We aim to provide a straightforward way of continuously monitoring colony health in a low-cost manner that requires little labour and that provides high-resolution insight on hive-health. This will provide a powerful tool for regular testing, replacing or directing traditional health evaluation approaches, making informed decisions regarding treatments and monitoring their efficacy.