Bee Lateral Symposium

Today I went to a all day symposium setup here in Leuven. The topic was bees, and the presenters were from various universities, mostly Flemish, presenting their research. The first speaker was from Germany, Duesseldorf to be exact. She spoke about the sex determination mechanism in honey bees. It is pretty ground breaking research, and the method for sex determination in the honey bee is quite complex. Basically, if the sex determination gene is heterozygous, then a gene is expressed resulting in a female bee, if the organism is haploid or homozygous diploid, then a male results. Much more complicated than XX = girl and XY = boy.

The second speaker was someone from my lab here that is working on expanding some of the knowledge about peptides that were published in the Science paper I helped author. She is trying to link one of these peptides with circadian rhythm. Very interesting stuff, and she is doing some really neat tricks with molecular biology and expressing honey bee genes in human cancer cell lines. Crazy!

The third talk was another person from Leuven, although not from my lab. He was doing some gene expression studies on microarrays that are made at the University of Illinois in Champaign/Urbana. Small world eh? My daughter was made there. The microarrays were allowing him to look at expression of more than 13,000 putative genes when honey bees are presented with different pesticides.

Next was the lunch break. We had lunch at a nice Chinese restaurant in the Oude Markt. I sat with four professors all from Flemish Universities. They were very nice and spoke English for much of the meal so that I could partake in the conversation. The highlight of this was that one of the professors is an ant researcher here in Leuven. Big deal right, well yeah! But for a strange reason. See, this particular individual is a sort of celebrity when it comes to ants and commercials. Scientifically, there are many ant species that will walk along a pheromone line. So if you put pheromone in an invisible line, the ants will follow it. There was a Belgian sugar manufacturing company that was wanting to make a commercial showing that ants prefer their sugar to artificial sweeteners. So this guy took a special ant and helped them make this commercial. After this success, he was then contacted by an American company. GM/Saturn wanted to use ants to make a Superbowl commercial. After 3 days of filming and some trickery, the ants obliged and many a Saturn Vue were sold, maybe. Fortunately I found the video clip on youtube for this commercial. Click here to see the video.

The talks in the afternoon were mostly agriculturally oriented. Bees are very important in agriculture and pollination, and since many different pest and parasites are harming honey bee colonies world wide, there is a lot of research going into this area. I don't remember as many specifics in these talks as I was getting a really bad headache. I eventually left one talk early to head home. I think that lunch was a bit high in MSG (monosodiumglutamate) and that causes headaches in some people (me included). But overall the symposium was a huge success and I made a few contacts that could lead to some interesting mass spectrometry studies in the coming months.