Dancing bees and deceptive viruses

Media bulletins

Two stories today:

Dancing bees and a dancing bee researcher

A researcher at The University of Sydney has just released his latest research on honey bee interpretive dance.

He’s got some nice vision of bees dancing, and he can dance too.

James Makinson has been evicting bees from their homes to figure out how they find a new nest site. It’s work that could help with understanding and managing honeybees for pollination services, ecological health, and pest control.

He’ll be at Sydney Uni with bees today. He’s also provided some footage of the bees ‘dancing’ about where to nest, then heading off after coming to agreement.

James does a good ‘waggle dance’ too. He was a national finalist of FameLab Australia -a science communication competition for early-career researchers.

More below

Also: Do you look infected? Should I kill you? No, I’m fine, move along

How viruses use ‘fake’ proteins to hide in our cells: some viruses can hide in our bodies for decades. They make ‘fake’ human proteins that trick our immune cells into thinking ‘everything is awesome’, there’s nothing to see here.

Now researchers at the Imaging Centre of Excellence at Monash and Melbourne Universities have used synchrotron light to determine the basic structure of one of the two known families of these deceptive proteins.

We issued this story on Friday and it will be published in September’s Journal of Biological Chemistry.

More below

 

Interpretative dance coaxes bees into quick decisions on nest siteslogo - in association

Footage and photos of dancing bees available

Scientist available for interview, Wednesday 9 July 2014

Dr James Makinson evicts bees from their homes for a good reason – to figure out how they collectively decide on the next place to live. His research on bee communication and consensus-building has been published in this month’s issue of Animal Behaviour.

James and his colleagues at the University of Sydney in partnership with two universities in Thailand have found that not all honeybee species think like the common Western hive bee when it comes to deciding on a place to nest.

Two little-known species-the giant Asian honeybee and the tiny red dwarf honeybee-use a more  rapid collective decision-making process that enables them to choose a new home quickly. But they aren’t as fussy when it comes to the quality of their new home.

It’s work that could help with understanding and managing honeybees for pollination services, ecological health, and pest control.

“We know a fair bit about the nesting behaviour of honeybees through the work already done on the Western hive bee-the common honeybee that produces honey for our morning toast,” says James, a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Sydney.

“When Western hive bees want to find a new place to nest, the queen along with a subset of the colony’s workers set out as a swarm, which forms a temporary cluster in the vegetation close to their existing nest site. Then, from this cluster, scout bees take off and search for a specific nest location.”

According to James, the scout bees will spend around 40 minutes evaluating a potential nest site before returning to the swarm and communicating the distance, direction and the quality of the site they’ve found, through the figure-of-eight movements of their distinctive ‘waggle’ dance.

The scout bees then head back and re-evaluate the site a number of times before eventually convincing  the entire swarm to move to a very specific location.

But James and his colleagues have found that the giant Asian honeybee and the red dwarf honeybee aren’t quite as fussy when it comes to deciding where to go.

“Both the giant Asian honeybee and red dwarf honeybee species come to a much more rapid decision,” says James. “We found that only during the final 15 minutes of the decision-making process do swarms reach a directional consensus on where to go, and that in some cases the scout bees’ dances were still indicating different distances. We assume they figure out a specific nest location once the swarm is on the move in that direction.”

From their observations, the team has developed computer models to help make sense of honeybee communication, which James says could also help inform new technologies in other areas.

“Hopefully in the near future, bee-inspired algorithms will be helping humanity solve complex problems and deal with big datasets.”

James was an Australian national finalist of FameLab – a global science communication competition for early-career scientists. He was also the winner of the NSW state final.

Videos, photos and background information available at: www.scienceinpublic.com.au/fresh/honeybees

For interview: 

James Makinson, University of Sydney, (+61 2) 9351 3642,  james.makinson@sydney.edu.au

Media contacts: 

Laura Boland, Science in Public/FameLab Australia, +61 408 166 426, (+61 3) 9398 1416, laura@scienceinpublic.com.au

Niall Byrne, Science in Public/FameLab Australia, +61 417 131 977, (+61 3) 9398 1416, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au

Verity Leatherdale, University of Sydney Media and Public Relations, +61 403 067 342, (+61 2) 9114 0748, verity.leatherdale@sydney.edu.au

Do you look infected? Should I kill you? No, I’m fine, move along, nothing to see

How viruses use ‘fake’ proteins to hide in our cells

Some viruses can hide in our bodies for decades. They make ‘fake’ human proteins that trick our immune cells into thinking ‘everything is awesome’, there’s nothing to see here.

Now researchers at the Imaging Centre of Excellence at Monash and Melbourne Universities have determined the basic structure of one of the two known families of these deceptive proteins.

Using synchrotron light and working with a common virus that lives in people happily and for the most part harmlessly, they worked out the structure of the fake proteins. This is an important first step towards producing better vaccines and drugs to fight viral disease.

The research was posted online last week by the Journal of Biological Chemistry. It will appear in the September issue of the journal.

The paper describes the structure of m04 immunoevasin from mouse cytomegalovirus, a member of the m02 protein family.

Cytomegaloviruses belong to the herpesvirus family whose members can cause glandular fever, chicken pox and cold sores. About half the population become infected with the virus, develop flu-like illness and then carry the virus for life. But the virus can be dangerous to pregnant women and people whose immune system becomes supressed.

The mouse variant is an important model for understanding how this family of viruses can hide from our immune systems.

“Our work highlights how these viruses mimic the immune system in order to evade it,” says Monash University’s Dr Richard Berry, a senior author of the paper. He works in a research group led by Prof Jamie Rossjohn, the other senior author and a Chief Investigator of the Imaging Centre.

Mouse and human immune T-cells patrol our bodies checking on the health of cells. One of things they look for is a complex of proteins on the surface of cells. This major histocompatibility complex (MHC) presents a snapshot of what’s inside the cell. If bits of viral protein are detected by the T cells, they flag the infected cell for destruction.

Viruses fight back by disrupting the production of the MHC protein complex, thus reducing the numbers on the outer membrane.

But then, the next stage of what could be described as an evolutionary arms race kicks in. If there are too few MHC proteins on the outer membrane of a cell, then a different type of immune cell, termed the natural killer cell, will kill the cell just to be safe.

Cytomegaloviruses have responded to this by making large families of fake cellular proteins that interfere with natural killer cell recognition. It is the basic structure of one of these families that Rossjohn, Berry and their colleagues have become the first researchers to reveal.

“It’s been a race against our international competitors which we won with the help of the Australian Synchrotron,” Rossjohn says. “We were only able to produce very small protein crystals from which to solve the structures-too small to allow us to gain meaningful data with anything other than synchrotron X-rays.”

Abstract and paper available at: www.jbc.org/content/early/2014/06/30/jbc.M114.584128.full.pdf

More about the Imaging Centre at: www.imagingcoe.org

More information and photos available at: www.scienceinpublic.com.au/arc-imaging/fake

Contacts:

Richard Berry, senior author, Richard.berry@monash.edu.au

Media contacts:

Niall Byrne, +61 417 131 977, niall@scienceinpublic.com.au (for the ARC Imaging Centre)

Lucy Handford, lucy.handford@monash.edu (for Monash University)

Anne Rahilly, +61 432 758 734, anne.rahilly@unimelb.edu.au (for the University of Melbourne)

Science in Public

We’re always happy to help put you in contact with scientists. Our work is funded by the science world – from the Prime Minister’s Science Prizes to Nature. We’re keen to suggest interesting people and stories – and not just those of our clients’.

If you’re looking for ideas or people for features we know hundreds of science prize winners past, present, and future and are always happy to chew the fat about the developing themes in Australian science.

Feel free to pass these stories along to colleagues. And between bulletins, you can follow me on Twitter (@scienceinpublic) for more science news and story tips.

Kind regards,

Niall
________

Niall Byrne

Creative Director
Science in Public
82 Hudsons Road, Spotswood VIC 3015
PO Box 2076 Spotswood VIC 3015
03 9398 1416, 0417 131 977

niall@scienceinpublic.com.au
twitter.com/scienceinpublic
Full contact details at www.scienceinpublic.com.au