But for this semester, I want to provide a broader view of research at PSU. Research isn't just people sitting in labs at the Millennium Science Complex or Fenske Laboratory. Research can be things like going to the Middle East to do digs or looking at how the diet of children change when they immigrate to the US. Pretty much every field does research, and a lot of it is pretty darn interesting. I hope to encompass many different fields and many different methods of research this semester to provide a better representation of why Penn State is considered such a successful research university.
I'll start the transition slowly: with bees!
Many animals exhibit altruism, which means that they "increase the fitness of an individual while decreasing the fitness of themselves." In plainer language, it means they're selfless. These actions seems counterintuitive, as the entire goal of an organism is to reproduce. More specifically, they want to propagate their genes. Herein lies the key. An altruistic action may decrease their chances of personally reproducing, but makes their genes go further overall. Bees provide a wonderful study group for this kind of hypothesis, due to queen-worker society present in their hives. Christina Grozinger, professor of entomology, and others at Penn State, in conjunction with Washington University of St. Louis, are looking at these bees to find how different genes may promote altruism.
With bees, it is smart to group their genetic matter into two groups: genes that are received from the mother (called matrigenes), and genes received from the father (called patrigenes). Many of the worker bees (which are all female) and the queen are sisters, which means that they all have the same matrigenes. What is different between them is their patrigenes, as multiple different male bees fertilize the queen's eggs.
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| Male (Drone) Bee. The poor sod doesn't even get to collect nectar Image Courtesy of Waugsberg |
While it makes sense that the worker bees support and care for the queen's young, and it means that their matrigenes are being passed on, what was more confusing was what happens when the queen dies. Some workers are selfish and lay their own eggs in an attempt to become the new queen, and others remain fertile and continue to take care of the young altruistically.
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| Eggs laid by workers without a queen Image Courtesy of Bernardo Niño / Penn State |
What was found by the researchers is that strong matrigenes promoted altruistic behavior, while more dominant patrigenes caused selfishness. This is due to that previous stated fact about drones: that there are multiple patrigene 'pools' throughout the worker population. If a bee has stronger patrigenes, she will want to lay her own eggs and pass on her patrigenes, but if a bee has stronger matrigenes, they will behave altruistically and take care of the new queen, and thus help pass along those matrigenes. To prove this to be true, the researchers did extensive tracking of matrigenes and patrigenes among workers using key sections of DNA that were unique to the mother's genes or the father's.
Altruism has always been supposed to be based off of genetics, but their research on how patrigenes and matrigenes affect it gives new concrete proof of the concept in insect societies.
If you'd like to read the entire paper and get into the nitty-gritty, you can find it here
