Browsing by Subject "vitellogeniinit"

The honey bee is ecologically important and nowadays, it is intensively studied species because of its decline worldwide. Vitellogenin (vg) is a pleiotropic gene that affects especially yolk formation but also e.g. longevity, immunity and labour division in honey bee. Recently, three vitellogenin-like genes have been found, but their functions are not yet discovered. They are named vitellogenin-like-A, vitellogenin-like-B and vitellogenin-like-C. Objectives of this MSc thesis were: i) Are vg and vg-like-genes expressed when the bee is exposed to oxidative stress, ii) Is Vg protein removed from the bee’s hemolymph after shielding her, and iii) Are vg-like-genes expressed abundantly in overwintering bees, like vg is. Oxidative stress was induced by injecting Paraquat. Sham injection was done with physiological saline. Control group had no injections. We found that inflammation by injection (both sham and Paraquat) had a surprisingly strong upregulating effect on vg and vg-like-A expression. Vg-like-B was only significantly upregulated by Paraquat, and vg-like-C had very low expression level with no treatment effect. When measuring Vg protein from fat body and hemolymph samples, no differences were found between treatments. Winter bees expressed high amounts of vg and vg-like-A. Taken together, it looks like vg-like-A works the same shielding way as vg, and vg-like-B slightly too, but vg-like-C might have specialized in other functions.