Research Terms
This probiotic designed for honey bees enables them to degrade ingested pesticides, which should help protect the colony. Honey bees are key pollinators for many crops, adding $15 billion in value to U.S. agricultural production per year. “Colony collapse disorder,” when the majority of a colony’s worker bees abandon the hive and leave behind a queen, food, and immature bees, is one problem plaguing honey bees.. Although all of the causes of colony collapse disorder aren’t known, this problem threatens both commercial beekeeping and production of many crops that depend on pollination by honey bees. One of the major stressors leading to colony collapse is thought to be non-target exposure to agricultural pesticides used to control insect pests and insects that vector crop diseases. Although the residual concentration of insecticide on crops is usually nonlethal to the worker bees directly, these toxins are often present in the nectar and pollen collected and carried back to the colony and have a chronic negative effect on the overall health of a colony.
Researchers at the University of Florida have developed modified bacteria (that are normally associated with honey bees) that have the ability to detoxify some of the major classes of insecticide to which bees will be exposed. These modified bacteria are essentially a probiotic that will detoxify many of the insecticides thought to contribute to colony collapse disorder.
Probiotic for honey bees that detoxifies commonly used agricultural insecticides and thus minimizes off-target effects on honey bee colonies and helps maintain hive productivity
Researchers engineer the bacteria normally associated with honey bees to produce enzymes that will degrade (detoxify) commonly used agricultural insecticides such as synthetic pyrethroids, organophosphates, and neonicotinoids. These modified bacteria that live in the gut of honey bees will be spread among both workers as well as the queen, drones and larvae, protecting the entire colony from the sub-lethal, but negative effects of insecticides that almost inevitably will be picked up by workers.
A bacterial organism associated with honey bees can be used to create a safe and effective vaccine for immunization against a common and serious sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhea. The non-pathogenic, naturally attenuated, obligate commensal of honey bees, bacterium Snodegrassella alvi (S. alvi), is distantly related to Neisseria gonorrhoeae, which is responsible for the sexually transmitted infection, gonorrhea. S. alvi expresses a number of proteins similar to those produced by N. gonorrhoeae, and antibodies raised against S. alvi bind with high affinity to N. gonorrhoeae, which promises to provide protective immunity against infection. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 800,000 new gonococcal infections occur in the United States each year, leading to serious and permanent health problems in both men and women. No vaccines are available to prevent gonorrhea, and previous attempts at developing an effective vaccine have failed, limiting available treatment options to the use of antibiotics. Since the gonorrhea-causing N. gonorrhoeae pathogen rapidly develops resistance to antibiotics, this makes the infection increasingly hard to treat and increases health care costs as well as spread of infection.
In addition, another related organism, Neisseria meningitidis, causes meningococcal meningitis, and it’s likely that S. alvi can be used as the basis for creating a vaccine to protect against this serious and sometimes fatal disease.
Attenuated live bacterial vaccine using the honey bee commensal bacteria S. alvi to generate a safe and effective immune response that provides protection against Neisseria infections (including gonorrhea and bacterial meningitis)
S. alvi (a honey bee obligate commensal bacterium) forms the basis of a naturally attenuated, live vaccine that will lead to production of antibodies that cross-react with Neisseriaceae gonorrhoeae and provide protective immunity against gonorrhea. Compelling in vivo data shows that vaccination of mice with S. alvi induces significant serum bactericidal activity against N. gonorrhoeae.