Identifying the link between viral infections and foraging behaviour in the honeybee brain

Insect pollinators are incredibly important to global food production and food security, with honey bees being by far the most important managed pollinating species in food production systems. Over the past few decades honey bees have been affected by a health crisis worldwide. The cause this crisis is multifactorial and includes modern agricultural practices, habitat changes, climate changes, pesticides and pathogens. Here in the UK, among the important pathogens are the recently introduced Varroa mite and the long-standing and endemic deformed wing virus (DWV). Together, Varroa and DWV have become a lethal cocktail severely affecting overwintering losses.
One of the more subtle effects of DWV on individual bees, but a critical effect on the colony itself, is DWV's negative effect on foraging activity. DWV-infected bees have a reduced life span and start foraging prematurely through accelerated behavioural maturation. Infected bees fly shorter distance and duration but perform more foraging trips, i.e. they are hyperactive. In earlier studies, DWV was demonstrated to impair learning and memory formation - a critical step for foraging behaviour following on from communication delivered in the waggle dance.
In this project you will investigate the implications of the virus presence in the bee brain. You will employ a range of different techniques to approach the problem from multiple angles. First, you will perform reversal learning assays through PER and quantitative analysis of the waggle dance to select bee with different cognitive abilities. Thereafter you will quantify DWV loads in the bee brain by means of real-time PCR. Samples that present the strongest correlation between viral loads and cognitive performance will be selected for a transcriptomic approach where the expression of the whole brain gene set will be quantified to identify key genes affected by the presence of DWV.
The last part of the studentship will be dedicated to applying two innovative techniques to this area of research. In the first approach you will use functional microscopy to identify the exact location of viral particles in different brain regions. Areas with the highest concentration of viral particles will be subjected to single-cell RNA sequencing, to characterize the effects the viral infection at the level of individual neurons. In the second approach antiviral therapies will be administered to bees to test whether brain gene expression can be rescued by reducing viral levels in the brain and, as a consequence, also cognitive functions can be restored.
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