Pollination services to increase crop production are becoming more and more important, as we are facing both climate change and a growing world population. Both are predicted to impact food security worldwide. High-density, commercial beekeeping has become a key link in the food supply chain, and diseases have become a central issue in hive losses...
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How insects pass immunity to their offspring.
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Social insects are able to mount both group-level and individual defences against pathogens. Here we focus on individual defences, by presenting a genome-wide analysis of immunity in a social insect, the honey bee Apis mellifera...
Read more at Insect Molecular Biology
Parents invest in their offspring by preparing them for defense against pathogens and parasites that only the parents have encountered, a phenomenon known as trans-generational immune priming. We investigated the underlying mechanism using the established lepidopteran model host Galleria mellonella...
Read more at Virulence
Insect immune systems can recognize specific pathogens and prime offspring immunity. High specificity of immune priming can be achieved when insect females transfer immune elicitors into developing oocytes....
Read more at PLOS Pathogens
Female insects that survive a pathogen attack can produce more pathogen-resistant offspring in a process called trans-generational immune priming. In the honey bee (Apis mellifera), the egg-yolk precursor protein Vitellogenin transports fragments of pathogen cells into the egg, thereby setting the stage for a recruitment of immunological defenses prior to hatching....
Read more at the Journal of Insect Physiology