Highly efficient integration and expression of piggyBac -derived cassettes in the honeybee ( Apis mellifera )

Abstract

Significance We report the first to our knowledge genetically engineered honeybees, which are important pollinators and interesting biological models for the study of social and complex behaviors as well as caste and sexual development. This genetic manipulation tool will enable systematic studies of biological processes in an organism building complex societies. We demonstrate highly efficient integration and expression of piggyBac -derived cassettes in the honeybee that make this system applicable to colony-based screening approaches and useful for an average beekeeping facility. This cassette was stably and efficiently transmitted and expressed in progeny by two different promoters, offering the prospect for activation or inhibition of gene functions under conditions of stage- and tissue-specific promoters.

Diet and endocrine effects on behavioral maturation-related gene expression in the pars intercerebralis of the honey bee brain

“…This hypothesis should be tested in the future, by testing the effects of perturbations to PI gene expression on behavioral maturation. Such targeted manipulations are currently beyond the scope of what is available for honey bees, but the recent report of transgenic honey bees (Schulte et al, 2014), coupled with advances in genome editing (Doudna and Charpentier, 2014), promise new possibilities in the near future.…”

Pollinators and Global Food Security: the Need for Holistic Global Stewardship

“…These include the development of swarms of robotic insects that can pollinate flowers (Srinivasan 2011;Wyss Institute 2016), the spraying of chemicals and hormones that force fruit set in unpollinated flowers (Wright 2013), the use of crop varieties that set fruit without pollination (these are seedless, sterile fruits), the genetic engineering of wind-pollinated crops (cereals) to make these crops produce the micro nutrients that are now provided by pollinator mediated crops (e.g., golden rice that contains high levels of beta-carotene, a precursor of pro vitamin A, see Beyer 2010) and the breeding (or genetic engineering) of bees that are resistant to pesticides, parasites and pathogens (Schulte et al 2014). For agricultural crops, hand pollination is also an option in some cases, but it is very labour intensive and in many cases not economically sustainable.…”

A piggyBac route to transgenic honeybees

“…Although maintaining stable transgenic lines under laboratory conditions is still going to be difficult, the ability to freeze sperm will enable researchers to reestablish key transgenic honeybee lines as needed and will facilitate sharing of important transgenic lines between laboratories. In the long term, the work by Schulte et al (3) paves the road for the application of state-of-the-art genome editing techniques such as the zinc finger nucleases (17), transcription activator-like effector nucleases (TALENs) (18), and the more recent clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR/Cas9) system (19) to the honeybee genome.…”

“…Nevertheless, establishing a causal relationship between specific genetic loci and phenotypes has been hindered by the lack of robust and reliable methods to manipulate honeybee gene expression, the generation of transgenes, and genome editing. In PNAS, Schulte et al (3) provide, to my knowledge, the first evidence that heritable germ-line manipulations of the honeybee genome are feasible by using engineered transposable elements. These welcome technical advances are likely to transform the fields of sociobiology and apiculture (commercial beekeeping) by helping investigators to establish causal relationships between genes and behavioral, developmental, and diseaserelated phenotypes.…”