Honeybee Genome Sequenced

mapkinase writes to let us know about articles in Nature on the completed sequencing of the honeybee genome. From the first article: "Two other insects have already been sequenced: the malaria-carrying mosquito Anopheles gambiae, and one of science's great model organisms, the fruitfly Drosophila melanogaster. Like these, the bee is much easier to manipulate and study than, say, the monkey. But unlike the mosquito and the fruitfly, the bee's social behavior is of special interest." Another article in the same issue clarifies why this sequencing is important: "The genome is helping to reveal some of those [such as the bees' dance language and the division of labor in the hive] mechanisms. For instance, there are 65 spots in the genome that seem to code for short RNA molecules called microRNAs (miRNAs), molecular switches that can turn genes on or off. The researchers found that miRNA activity differs between bees doing different jobs."

Comments

miRNA?

[Iron (III) Chloride]

Interesting that miRNA could be turned off and on. These play a role in helping dicer form the RISC, so I wonder what this may lead to, not only in terms of info on honeybee's social behavior, but RNAi.

Re:miRNA?

[Tatarize]

It's neat to find, but it had to be there. Each bee has the same core DNA. The drones and queen and each sub variety of bee all use the same DNA. For the geeks in the audience who aren't bio-geeks as well.

Make Wings;
Make Thorax;
Make Head;
Size = 10;
if (Bee == Queen){//miRNA
        Size = 30;
        Behavior = "Go around laying eggs";
}
else {
        Size = 10;
        Behavior = "Go around gathering honey";
}

Give or take. miRNA goes around turning off certain gene stuff. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but I'd like to know the relationship between miRNA and royal jelly.

softICE, anyone?

[Connie_Lingus]

Is it just me, or does the whole DNA/Genome decoding process sound like rather complex dis-assembly project? Every living thing on this planet is nothing but a quad-nary based executable with VERY VERY good error-correction duplication.

Re:softICE, anyone?

[Nigel Stepp]

Oh, it's much worse than that. Imagine if the opcode for ADD, say, would add to BX if it were after a JMP, but to AX if it were after a MOV.

Many of the features of biology are context dependent, which makes predicative analysis quite difficult.

Re:softICE, anyone?

[Dark_MadMax666]

Very RY VERY good error-correction duplication

Uhh. ohhh. quite the opposite. Error correction is very bad (by IT standards at least) -that is how actually things evolve (since there is no mechanism for modification except mutation - which is an error). On average every single cell in human body has at least one error. Granted absolute majority of them are insignificant (since they happen on non functioning parts of code for this cell) .

  Living organism are quite a freaking mess from engineer's point of view. -Heck that's what you get if you launch a very shoddy evolutionary algorithm and run it for a couple of hundred millions of years.

honeybees are very cool

[myc]

besides their social behavior, there is a lot known about how the navigation system of honeybees works (i.e., how they find the hive after foraging). Understanding honeybee genetics could have an impact on understanding and designing autonomous systems for robotics.