Skip to main content
Entomology 2023 Main banner
Bayer
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
In-Person
In-Person
On-Demand
On-Demand
Student Competition
Student Competition
Poster
Poster
Ticketed Event
Ticketed Event
ViewAttendees 4

Student 10-Minute Paper

Physiology, Biochemistry, and Toxicology

Student Competition

Student

Grad Competition PBT: Functional Genetics

Characterizing patterns of gene expression and genome wide methylation across temporal stages of cold stress in the bumble bee Bombus vosnesenskii

Monday, November 6, 2023
8:00 AM - 8:12 AM ET
Location: Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center, National Harbor 10
In-Person Student Competition
When faced with stressful abiotic situations, rapid plastic responses can determine an organism’s probability of survival. Dynamic temperature fluctuations, as might be experienced during seasonal transitions, may require responses to the onset, duration, and recovery from temperature change. Cold tolerance is especially interesting, as many insects show individual and population level variation in response to cold, while upper temperature thresholds are often fairly conserved. Bumble bees (Bombus) are important early season pollinators, and may experience intermittent cold events. Molecular mechanisms, in particular gene expression regulation, can aid individual’s responses to thermal stress, however, we still require a better understanding of the mechanisms that drive temperature induced transcriptional shifts. The role that epigenetic modifications such as DNA methylation can play in regulating the response to thermal stress are largely unexplored. For this study, we used laboratory-reared colonies from a wild population of the bumble bee Bombus vosnesenskii to investigate the transcriptional and methylation changes of bees subjected to gradual cooling, induction of chill coma, and recovery from a chilled state. RNA-Seq and EM-Seq data were generated from the thorax and brains of 98 workers to characterize differential patterns between individuals across control and treatment groups. These data will be used to help establish correlations between differentially expressed genes and methylation patterns to determine the influence methylation has, if any, on the rapid response of bumble bees to cold stress.