BBSRC Partnering Award Helps British Bees

A partnership between the UK and US was forged by BBSRC to revolutionize approaches to investigate honeybee health, an important vector in agriculture. The research investigates the three-way interaction of the honeybee, DWV, and the Varroa mite in a full colony. Researchers at University of Warwick led by Prof. David J. Evans have seen changes in the host upon mite infestation and virus infection and have studied viral diversity and selection of pathogenic recombinant forms of DWV in vivo. To conduct an RNAi-based gene knockdown studies and virus challenge, researcher Jess Fannon learned new methods to maintain honeybee larvae in vitro.

Two to three day old larvae are harvested from a colony and fed an artificial diet under carefully controlled environmental conditions. Over a 15-18 day period the larvae grow, pupate and - if maintained long enough - emerge as adult bees. Controlled larval feeding 2-3 times a day allows oral delivery of bacteria expressing RNAi for studies. DWV can be delivered in larval food, or, by injection of pupae. Thus, raising larvae and pupae in vitro allows the conduct of dose response studies to test antiviral therapies and enables statistically robust analysis of results.

See the original news at http://www.bbsrc.ac.uk/news/people-skills-training/2013/130916-n-pa-helps-british-bees.aspx