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PKA and PKC content in the honey bee central brain differs in genotypic strains with distinct foraging behavior

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Abstract

Selection of honey bees for pollen storage resulted in high and low pollen-hoarding strains differing in foraging behavior traits including resource choice and quality, load size, sucrose responsiveness, age of foraging initiation, and learning performance. To determine how these genotypic differences correlate with changes at the level of proteins involved in neuronal function, we measured the content of protein kinase A, protein kinase C, and synapsin in the brains of high- and low-strain bees. In the central brain protein kinase A and protein kinase C levels were greater in high-strain bees and increased from emergence to 5 days in both strains. By 15 days, high-strain bees retained significantly higher levels of protein kinase C than low-strain bees, but overall protein kinase C content decreased in both strains. Synapsin levels increased from emergence to 5 days but did not differ between the two strains. In contrast to the protein kinase A content in the central brain, the basal protein kinase A activity did not differ between the strains or between the two age groups. This provides first evidence that the two genetic strains of honey bees show characteristic differences in the regulation of protein expression that may contribute to the behavioral differences between them.

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Fig. 1a–c.
Fig. 2.
Fig. 3.

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Abbreviations

PKA:

protein kinase A

PKC:

protein kinase C

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSF grants IBN 0090482 and IBN 0076811 to Robert E. Page and Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Sonderforschungsbereich 515/C3 to Uli Müller. We thank Anke Friedrich for assistance with ELISA assays and Ulf Thomas for help with PKA activity assays. We also would like to thank Joachim Erber and Ricarda Scheiner for many discussions and encouraging us to do these experiments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Entomology, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, USA

    M. A. Humphries, M. K. Fondrk & R. E. Page Jr

  2. Institut Für Neurobiologie, Freie Universität Berlin, 14195, Berlin, Germany

    U. Müller

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  1. M. A. Humphries
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  2. U. Müller
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  3. M. K. Fondrk
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  4. R. E. Page Jr
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Correspondence to M. A. Humphries.

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Humphries, M.A., Müller, U., Fondrk, M.K. et al. PKA and PKC content in the honey bee central brain differs in genotypic strains with distinct foraging behavior. J Comp Physiol A 189, 555–562 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-003-0433-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00359-003-0433-z

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