Anna M Chernyshova

The University of Western Ontario | UWO · Department of Biology

Paenibacillus larvae is a spore-forming bacterial entomopathogen and causal agent of the important honey bee larval disease, American foulbrood (AFB). Active infections by vegetative P. larvae are often deadly, highly transmissible, and incurable for colonies but, when dormant, the spore form of this pathogen can persist asymptomatically for years....

Analyzing the information-rich content of RNA can help uncover genetic events associated with social insect castes or other social polymorphisms. Here, we exploit a series of cDNA libraries previously derived from whole-body tissue of different castes as well as from three behaviourally distinct populations of the Eastern subterranean termite Retic...

There is emerging concern regarding the unintentional and often unrecognized antimicrobial properties of “non-antimicrobial” pesticides. This includes insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides commonly used in agriculture that are known to produce broad ranging, off-target effects on beneficial wildlife, even at seemingly non-toxic low dose exposure...

Abstracts of papers presented at the 2021 virtual meeting on Biology & Genomics of Social Insects, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory

The process of caste differentiation is central to understanding insect sociality, because it is task specialization that enables division of labor within eusocial colonies. Selection presumably favors colonies that can adjust their division of labor in response to changing environmental demands, and for many taxa genetic and epigenetic factors are...

The evolution of sterile helper castes in social insects implies selection on genes that underlie variation in this nonreproductive phenotype. These focal genes confer no direct fitness and are presumed to evolve through indirect fitness effects on the helper's reproducing relatives. This separation of a gene's phenotypic effect on one caste and it...

Widespread antibiotic usage in apiculture contributes substantially to the global dissemination of antimicrobial resistance and has the potential to negatively influence bacterial symbionts of honey bees (Apis mellifera). Here, we show that routine antibiotic administration with oxytetracycline selectively increased tetB (efflux pump resistance gen...

American foulbrood (AFB) is a highly virulent disease afflicting honey bees (Apis mellifera). The causative organism, Paenibacillus larvae, attacks honey bee brood and renders entire hives dysfunctional during active disease states, but more commonly resides in hives asymptomatically as inactive spores that elude even vigilant beekeepers. The mecha...

On the cover: The cover image represents an ecological network featuring two honey bees foraging on wildflowers [PC: Emma Mullen, Cornell University]. As explained by Faragalla et al. in their Perspective and Hypothesis feature article [Vol. 330: 317-329]: ‘From Gene List to Gene Network: Recognizing the Functional Connections that Regulate Behavio...

The study of social breeding systems is often gene focused, and the field of insect sociobiology has been successful at assimilating tools and techniques from molecular biology. One common output from sociogenomic studies is a gene list. Gene lists are readily generated from microarray, RNA sequencing, or other molecular screens that typically aim...

The caste system of social insects presents a classic polyphenism in which widely divergent reproductive and non-reproductive phenotypes are expressed from the same genome. In termites, the sterile soldier caste is particularly divergent in phenotype and presumably evolved under selection for defensiveness. In this study, we use genomic phylostrati...

Many animals have individual and social mechanisms for combating pathogens. Animals may exhibit short-term physiological tradeoffs between social and individual immunity because the latter is often energetically costly. Genetic tradeoffs between these two traits can also occur if mutations that enhance social immunity diminish individual immunity,...