Articles] Bees' genes match their jobs

Bees' genes match their jobs DNA switches turn workers to nursemaids. 10 October 2003 JOHN WHITFIELD

A honeybee's genes can tell you its job. Bees tending the nest have a different set of active genes
in their brains to their nestmates out gathering food, researchers have found.

There are many biological steps between DNA and deeds, says Gene Robinson of the University of
Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. To find the two so closely linked is a surprise. "The genome is more
heavily involved in orchestrating behaviour than one might have thought," he says.

Bees could help us map similar links in humans. "We share many components in our nervous systems
with the honeybee," says bee researcher Greg Hunt of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.
In fruitflies, equivalents to the honeybee job genes are involved in learning, through their control
of cell communication.

Robinson's team built a computer chip bearing DNA sequences representing about 5,500 honeybee genes
- about half of the bee genome. Genes that are active in a tissue sample stick to their equivalent
on the chip, creating a glowing spot. The busier the gene, the brighter the spot.

About 40% of genes change their activity between nursemaids and foragers, the researchers found.
This pattern is consistent enough to match bees to jobs on genes alone. The team tested samples from
the brains of 60 insects from three hives.

Such large-scale patterns are the best guide to the complex chemistry behind animal actions, reasons
entomologist Robert Page of the University of California, Davis. "We're not going to find a gene for
this and a gene for that," he says.

Read the rest at Nature http://www.nature.com/nsu/031006/031006-15.html

Comment: Human and bee lines split long before the bee behaviour evolved - there is no relationship
between bee and human behaviour accept that all society building animals must have some form of
communication - the more sophisticated and plastic the communication the more sophisticated and
plastic is the resulting society.

Free science journal hits press New journal challenges pay-per-view science. 10 October 2003
HELEN PEARSON

Monday sees the first issue of a new magazine for scientists. Its arrival is already causing a stir:
unlike other journals that record research about biology and medicine, this one is free.

The scientists behind the journal, called PLoS Biology, are challenging standard publishing
practice, in which researchers pay to read others' results in journals. They argue that this
is unfair - to scientists who submit their work freely and to the public whose taxes subsidize
the research.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS), a non-profit organization based in San Francisco, is not the
first to try so-called open-access publishing. Physicists post most papers onto online servers
before they go into print. And since 2000, a London-based company called BioMed Central has
published more than 100 free-access biomedical journals.

But PLoS Biology is shooting for the big time. Promoted by an American television advertising
campaign this summer, it aims to compete head-on with top-tier scientific journals such as Science,
Nature and Cell. Unlike these, it does not charge readers for online access - instead, PLoS charges
researchers $1,500 to publish a paper.

The move is part of a sea-change underway in science journals. Library-bound tomes have given way to
fast-turnaround online papers with numerous links. Even the effectiveness of peer review, in which
papers are screened by other researchers before publication, is being called into question. "It's
reflective of changing times in publication," says biologist Jim Woodgett of the Ontario Cancer
Institute in Canada.

One scientist backing PLoS is Stephen Cohen of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in
Heidelberg, Germany. A paper of his features in the debut issue. Cohen hopes that the journal will
prove a hit and force others to drop their prices. "[PLoS] aims to change the landscape," he says.

http://www.nature.com/nsu/031006/031006-12.html

Kind Regards, Robert Karl Stonjek.