Recipient Organization
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, RIVERSIDE
(N/A)
RIVERSIDE,CA 92521
Performing Department
Entomology
Non Technical Summary
Honey bees are the most abundant managed pollinators in the U.S. and their health and productivity is essential for ensuring reliable fruit sets, yield, and seed production of numerous high-value crops. Worryingly, temperatures recorded in recent heat waves impair bee survival and fertility, and such conditions will become more frequent and intense in the future. Our long-term goal is to mitigate the risk of impaired pollination services due to climate change by 1) identifying commercially viable honey bee stocks that are resilient to heat, 2) determining the underlying physiological mechanisms governing sex- and stock-specific patterns of heat resilience, and 3) employing genetic markers to enrich heat resilience in honey bee populations through selective breeding. The proposed work will address goals within the AG2PI program areas in the following ways:- We will conduct a much-needed screen of heat tolerance phenotypes across breeding populations to produce a benchmark dataset of U.S. commercial bee stocks, and use these data to improve animal management recommendations in U.S. climes.- We will combine genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data with sex- and stock-specific heat resilience phenotypes, leading to a novel understanding of how heat affects honey bee survival, physiology, and their ability to reproduce.- We will develop genetic markers for heat resilience to improve stock performance predictions, and use these markers to enrich heat resilience in a selective breeding program.Through these activities, we will ultimately help the beekeeping industry make climate-conscious decisions securing essential pollination services under changing environmental conditions.
Animal Health Component
20%
Research Effort Categories
Basic
80%
Applied
20%
Developmental
0%
Goals / Objectives
We will address the following goals:- We will conduct a much-needed screen of heat tolerance phenotypes across breeding populations to produce a benchmark dataset of U.S. commercial bee stocks, and use these data to improve animal management recommendations in U.S. climes.- We will combine genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic data with sex- and stock-specific heat resilience phenotypes, leading to a novel understanding of how heat affects honey bee survival, physiology, and their ability to reproduce.- We will develop genetic markers for heat resilience to improve stock performance predictions, and use these markers to enrich heat resilience in a selective breeding program.Through these activities, we will ultimately help the beekeeping industry make climate-conscious decisions securing essential pollination services under changing environmental conditions.
Project Methods
Here, we propose to combine systematic heat tolerance testing of U.S. commercial (9 genotypes) and non-commercial (1 genotype) sources with a systems-biology investigation into the underlying patterns of genomic, proteomic, and metabolomic profiles associated with this phenotype. We will account for sex biases by recording survival for drones, workers, and queens, as well as differential impacts of heat on male fertility by testing sperm viability in drone ejaculates and queen spermathecae. Given the role of HSPs in heat stress and viral infections, we will also assess pre-existing viral loads across the 10 genotypes and conduct inoculation experiments based on the most prevalent virus to quantify virus resistance among genotypes. Sequencing of honey bee stocks and employing population genomic approaches, such as admixture analyses, can reveal robust lineage-based signatures of thermal adaptation. We will conduct genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of stocks with the highest and lowest heat tolerance to reveal SNPs that are indicative of heat resilience. Shot-gun proteomics and metabolomics will be used to identify key proteins and metabolites that correlate with phenotypic plasticity between sexes, and stocks with a particular interest in HSPs and antioxidant molecules. Coupling heat challenge and viral experiments can reveal molecular signatures that covary, in turn narrowing down the list of candidate biomarkers supporting bee breeding programs. Finally, we will assess the inheritance of heat tolerance through breeding experiments using artificial insemination of queens, which allows us to have full control of offspring genotype. By identifying key biomarkers here using multi-omics, future efforts can focus on functionally based approaches to understanding heat resilience in honey bees, such as RNAi or CRISPR knock-out experiments.