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.'"

Comments

Switching tasks changes MY DNA.

[reubenavery]

Totally feel the bees on that.

Whenever I need to completely switch gears from one project to the next (like going from Drupal into Zend Framework), I will require at least two weeks of downtime (although I would never dare admit to it to my manager). It's unavoidable. It's like my brain is jammed between channels and no matter how much I beat the horse, it will be this way while my neurons rearrange themselves. Then, one sunny day, bing it's all realigned and reprogrammed and I'm off to the productive races.

Wish there were medical-creative downtime available....

No, not actually changing the DNA

[damn_registrars]

Epigenetics is not about the DNA sequence itself, but rather about how the DNA is managed and accessed. Generally it refers to the protein that helps to condense the DNA and make some parts more accessible than others. Really the more noticeable change would be in their RNA, which is the sequence of expressed genes.

Basically if your genome is a tape library, RNA is your local hard drive, which is pulling files as needed from the tape library. Your system RAM is, of course, protein.