ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2009
Honey bee aggression supports a link between gene regulation and behavioral evolution.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 124 papers.
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124 citing papers in PubMed, 279 citations in OpenAlex.
- Effects of lithium chloride on queen egg-laying performance and worker honey bee behavior.Pest management science · 2026Article
- Substantial variation in larval honey bee nutrition within and among Apis mellifera colonies.PloS one · 2026Article
- Hangry bees: Pollen dearth impacts honey bee (Apis mellifera) behavior and physiology.PloS one · 2026Article
- Evolution of gene expression across brain regions in behaviourally divergent deer mice.Molecular ecology · 2025Article
- Repeated behavioural evolution is associated with convergence of gene expression in cavity-nesting songbirds.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Division of labour during honeybee colony defence: poetic and scientific views.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Review
- Division of labour in colony defence in a clonal ant.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Brain transcriptomics of a social challenge and maternal aggression in incubating female tree swallows.Hormones and behavior · 2025Article
- Individual and social heterosis act independently in honey bee (Apis mellifera) colonies.The Journal of heredity · 2025Article
- Honey Robbing: Causes, Impacts and Preventive Measures.Insects · 2024Review
- NMDAR-CaMKII Pathway as a Central Regulator of Aggressiveness: Evidence from Transcriptomic and Metabolomic Analysis in Swimming CrabsInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2024Article
- Review
- Article
- Single-cell dissection of aggression in honeybee colonies.Nature ecology & evolution · 2023Article
- Honey Bee Colonies (Insects · 2023Article
- Examining parent-of-origin effects on transcription and RNA methylation in mediating aggressive behavior in honey bees (Apis mellifera).BMC genomics · 2023Article
- DNMT1 mutant ants develop normally but have disrupted oogenesis.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Distinct gene regulatory signatures of dominance rank and social bond strength in wild baboons.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Time-course RNASeq of Camponotus floridanus forager and nurse ant brains indicate links between plasticity in the biological clock and behavioral division of labor.BMC genomics · 2022Article
- Identification of quantitative trait loci associated with calmness and gentleness in honey bees using whole-genome sequences.Animal genetics · 2021Article
64 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 6 institutions in 6 countries.
Funding
Abstract
A prominent theory states that animal phenotypes arise by evolutionary changes in gene regulation, but the extent to which this theory holds true for behavioral evolution is not known. Because "nature and nurture" are now understood to involve hereditary and environmental influences on gene expression, we studied whether environmental influences on a behavioral phenotype, i.e., aggression, could have evolved into inherited differences via changes in gene expression. Here, with microarray analysis of honey bees, we show that aggression-related genes with inherited patterns of brain expression are also environmentally regulated. There were expression differences in the brain for hundreds of genes between the highly aggressive Africanized honey bee compared with European honey bee (EHB) subspecies. Similar results were obtained for EHB in response to exposure to alarm pheromone (which provokes aggression) and when comparing old and young bees (aggressive tendencies increase with age). There was significant overlap of the gene lists generated from these three microarray experiments. Moreover, there was statistical enrichment of several of the same cis regulatory motifs in promoters of genes on all three gene lists. Aggression shows a remarkably robust brain molecular signature regardless of whether it occurs because of inherited, age-related, or environmental (social) factors. It appears that one element in the evolution of different degrees of aggressive behavior in honey bees involved changes in regulation of genes that mediate the response to alarm pheromone.
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