The BeeSpace Project
One of the most important questions in biology is the origin of particular behaviors: nature or nurture? Our project uses genomic biology to liberate the study of behavior from the shackles of this dichotomy. The new paradigm is that the environment ("nurture"), which includes other individuals, impacts an inherited genome ("nature") by orchestrating gene expression during the lifetime of the animal.
BeeSpace aims to analyze social behavior on an unprecedented whole-genome scale, using Apis mellifera, the Western honey bee, as the model organism. Honey bees live in a complex society governed by an age-related division of labor, with each individual assuming many roles during her lifetime. Both genetic heredity and environmental conditions determine what role a bee performs, and when she performs it. The biology research is generating a unique database of gene expressions for all social behavior, recording brain gene expression for hundreds of individuals, each with a specific societal role. These microarray experiments utilize the recently sequenced genome, supported by state-of-the-art statistics. The informatics research is developing an interactive environment to analyze all information sources relevant to bee social behavior. These include genome databases from honey bee and related organisms, linked to complete scientific literature relevant to insect behavior. New text mining technology is integrating molecular description with information from physiology, behavior, neuroscience, and evolution.
Our BeeSpace Concept Navigator, currently a usable prototype, enables users to navigate a uniform space of diverse databases and literature sources for hypothesis development and testing. The software system goes beyond a searchable database, using statistical literature analyses to discover functional relationships between genes and behavior. This research will enable all scientists who study bee genes to live on the frontier of integrative biology, where biotechnology enables routine expression analysis and bioinformatics enables functional analysis unconstrained by pre-existing categories.
The broader impact of the interactive environment for functional analysis is being tested in an international community of laboratories studying honey bees and related organisms. Outreach for BeeSpace is providing integrated research and education experiences at the graduate and undergraduate levels, plus training courses and outreach at high school and middle school levels.
The BeeSpace project is funded by a $5 million, five-year grant from the National Science Foundation's Frontiers in Integrative Biological Research (NSF FIBR) program, from September 2004 to August 2009.
