Switching Tasks Changes Worker Bee DNA

`puddingebola writes "A report in the journal Nature Neuroscience (paywalled) says scientists have observed epigenetic markers in bees that correspond to their roles in the society. From the article, 'Honeybees are born into their place in society. Those fed royal jelly as larvae emerge as queens and do little but lay eggs. The rest become worker bees and divvy up the jobs that need doing around the hive. While some worker bees remain at home, others take flight in search of nectar, pollen and other hive essentials. The entire honeybee workforce are genetically identical sisters. But analysis of the worker bees' DNA revealed that foragers had one pattern of chemical tags on their genes, while those that stayed home had another. When bees swapped one job for the other, their genetic tags changed accordingly.'"

Re:Genetically encoded thoughts?

[Chrontius]

Tasks are not! transcoded to DNA; this is NOT an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology [wikipedia.org]. The epigenome is RNA and protein and smaller signaling molecules; the DNA sequence itself is untouched, and nothing happens to the deoxy-ribose sugar backbone.

Think of it as the metadata getting changed, not the code - a differing pattern of lines of code being commented out.

A Hive is not identical sisters

[Anonymous Coward]

A Hive is not identical sisters. There are usually 3 to 5 males who mated with the Queen, so there are factions which are more closely related and they try to elevate their Queen larvae when the time comes to create a new Queen. Also, even the sisters with the same 2 parents are not genetically identical, they still have the usual mix of traits from both parents from when the egg was fertilized.

Re:Genetically encoded thoughts?

[Biotech_is_Godzilla]

Awesome metaphor! You're generally spot on - DNA base sequence is untouched / nothing happens to the phosphate backbone / epigenetics is all about controlling which genes are made into proteins - but to be nitpicky, an important epigenetic phenomenon which is probably also operating here is DNA methylation [wikipedia.org]. DNA is directly modified in a way which alters the pattern in which genes are expressed, is fairly long-term for the cell and is heritable by future generations of cells in the organism (i.e. epigenetically).

So the story title is very misleading, but technically correct.