Location: Southern Horticultural Research Unit
Project Number: 6062-21430-004-212-R
Project Type: Reimbursable Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: May 1, 2024
End Date: Apr 30, 2025
Objective:
Our overall goal is to systematically dissect the roles of honey bee genetic backgrounds, virus virulence and environmental factors in the severity of viral infections, we will evaluate various Russian honey bee genetic lines to uncover the underlying mechanisms of virus tolerance and develop genetic markers to be used in commercial queen breeding operations to select virus tolerance queens. These goals will be achieved through our collaborative research, addressing three interconnected objectives:
I. Understanding the interplay between honey bee genetic, virus virulence and the environmental factors in the severity of viral infections.
II. Characterizing variation in honey bee responses to viral infections based on host genetic background, viral strains and virus families and develop genetic markers.
III. Selection to reduce viral infections in commercial queen producing operations and evaluate the validity of genetic markers.
Approach:
We will initially tease apart the role of the virulence of virus strains collected from different parts of the country, honey bee genetic background, and the environmental factors in virus infection severity to understand how much each of these factors play a role to cause infection severity in honey bee colonies. This is an important research line to investigate, specially, in the US apiculture industry where colonies and queen are shipped among apiaries to different environment. Then by focusing within honey bee stocks, we will characterize variation in response of honey bee genetic lines to viral infections both at the cellular and individual level. We will also apply different viral strains and virus species in investigating the genetic lines to learn whether honey bees respond similarly to different pathogenic viruses or differently. Results will be complemented with transcriptomic analysis that will culminate in one targeted search for underlying tolerance/resistance mechanisms. The final objective will be in collaboration with three commercial queen breeders to perform a two-way selection among their breeder queens and put our findings into practice by validating the association of genetic markers with natural viral loads and induced responses and survival to acute viral challenges under realistic apicultural conditions in colonies of relevant genetic stock.
