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Professor Gene Robinson, Robinson Lab, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Smitten for life by these OVERACHIEVERS!
Professor Gene Robinson’s interest in bees started very early in his life. When he was 18 years old, he was asked to help in beekeeping. Despite having no background in bees or insects, he fell in love with these little creatures. He was so smitten by them that he decided to work with them for the rest of his life. He scientifically pursued them as he was interested in the scientific questions regarding the biology of bees which truly ‘got him going’.
Research highlights: Socially unresponsive bees
Providing a background to his research, Professor Gene Robinson mentioned that he and his co-researchers are interested in understanding the mechanism and evolution of social behavior. Bees as we know live in complex societies. Despite their tiny brain, they produce very complex social behavior. However, they are not the only species in complex societies. Across the planet, we see different species living in different societies, and consequently, a natural question arises in the field of evolutionary biology, ‘What is the relationship between these different societies?’
According to the professor, comparisons are not straightforward and are not always based on superficial similarities like both species live in societies. It is not that simple! Comparing bees to humans, another species with some social life, ‘bees are not little humans, or humans are not big bees.’ They have separate evolutionary histories. However, if they are evolutionarily distinct, are there any common mechanisms, or common evolutionary trajectories, or are there nothing in common between these two species? The use of genomics helps us understand such questions.
When we look at the brains of vertebrates (e.g., humans) and insects (e.g., bees), it is difficult to assign specific complementary relationships between the various regions of the brains of the two species, for example, are the brain regions related to each other? In contrast, with genes we can explore relationships by using mathematical algorithms. It is possible to see whether one gene of one species is similar (sequence-wise) to another gene of another species.
With this background context, Professor Robinson and his co-researchers looked into socially unresponsive bees. Bees that are consistently unresponsive refer to bees that are not responsive to particular stimuli in laboratory assays; social intruder assays, or social opportunity assays. What they found was the socially unresponsive bees have a distinct gene activity profile from that of the socially responsive bees. Hence, they identified and created a gene list from this profile and compared it to that of the human gene list already published for humans who fall in the autism spectrum, distinct from humans who do not fall in that spectrum. Then they compared both lists. Although the lists are not identical, there was ‘a statistically significant overlap of the genes.’ The researchers are not saying there are autistic bees, but they would like to consider, that ‘there are genes involved in the social responsiveness in bees, and some of the same genes are involved in the social responsiveness in humans.’ This indicates that perhaps there could be a ‘tool kit for building social responsiveness in the brain.’
During the interview, Professor Robinson also mentioned his other work related to the automated tracking of honeybees. He mentions there are a lot of individual differences among bees in terms of their behavior. In addition to the differences due to the division of labor, there are differences among individual bees within each category. For example, amongst the older bees who are all foraging, there are differences in the intensity of their individual foraging behavior. Researchers have been painstakingly observing such differences by sitting and watching. However, a barcoding system was developed by Dr. Tim Gernat to automate this monitoring of bee behavior. For more details on automated tracking, refer to our interview with Dr. Traniello, who was a Ph.D. student and coresearcher of Professor Robinson.
Here are two recent papers based on automated tracking:
https://journals.biologists.com/jeb/article/225/6/jeb243738/274836/Context-dependent-influence-ofthreat-on-honey-bee
Finally, Professor Robinson discusses how bees are difficult to work with. We have to be careful not to get stung and also it is important not to rile up bees then they won’t behave naturally if aggravated. That is such a helpful insight, thank you, professor!
Then why come back to bees as a researcher? Because bees are complex and mystifying. Like so many of our other bee researchers, the complexities of bees, and the challenges themselves attract Professor Robinson. He further mentions bees live in colonies and no two colonies are exactly the same. Each colony is an entity, with slightly unique properties, which makes it more challenging to generalize colony-related findings. It simply requires more work and more data collection across several colonies. According to the professor, ‘in essence, bees have a complex society which is produced by a brain small as a grass seed…traits produced by a unique dance language,’ leading to endlessly captivating and intriguing research questions.
So, one word that comes to his mind when he thinks of bees?
Actually, two words came to his mind. One is ‘indispensable’ which we have heard before in terms of these important pollinators. However, his second word is ‘overachievers!’
Totally agree, such an interesting way to describe our tiny little creatures, they are definitely overachievers!
Professor Robinson, you have such a wealth of knowledge, it was an absolute honor to interview you, thank you so much!
Did you know Professor has a Wiki page? Here it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_E._Robinson
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