91��ɫ Public policy and administration , a principal applicant on a $15-million grant for the recently announced Pan-Canadian Genome Library (PCGL) will establish the team responsible for patient partnership, participant engagement, training and outreach for this initiative, billed as the first-of-its-kind national genetics database.

“We are at a turning point where the scientific community has come to take seriously the patient-centric expression ‘nothing about us without us,’” says Stedman, a professor with the Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, who himself lives with a .

“Our goal with the PCGL is to continue to advance, pushing back on the status quo, and to elevate expectations related to the important role that patient partners must play in scientific research,” says Stedman, adding they will have a key role in creation and dissemination of patient and user engagement resources. “Some of our patient partners will take on roles that bridge multiple working groups, thus helping us improve both community and operational synergy across the project.”

Patient partners will be included in all relevant aspects of the technical work for PCGL, in decisions about dataset diversity and representativeness, in ethics, policy and regulatory decision-making.

Stedman will also be member of a working group that oversees ethics, public policy and regulatory compliance for the library that aims to capture, store, and improve access to Canadian genomic data, in an equitable, secure, and sustainable manner.

Dr. Guillaume Bourque, director of bioinformatics at the McGill Genome Centre will lead the project funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) with a team of researchers from , including 91��ɫ.

The CIHR grant builds on investments from the Government of Canada’s Drugs for Rare Diseases Strategy, and will provide researchers and health care professionals with a centralized database that reflects the rich diversity of people living in Canada, according to a federal government .

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TORONTO, May 16, 2023 – Wild bees living in cities like Toronto are facing increased environmental stressors compared to those in rural and even suburban areas, such as more pathogens and parasites, found researchers at 91��ɫ.

They also found changes in the microbiomes of wild bees living in densely urban areas and fragmented habitats, which makes it more difficult for the bees to access food sources, ideal nesting areas and mates.

These environmental stressors will likely increase in the future as cities expand and landscapes are reshaped, posing one of the largest threats to the natural ecosystems of wild bees and their biodiversity. Two-thirds of the world’s population are expected to live in cities by 2050.

“Having less connected habitats in dense urban areas not only leads to more inbreeding, so less genetic diversity, but it also creates higher pathogen diversity leaving city bees exposed to more pathogens,” says Corresponding author and Associate Professor of the Faculty of Science, 91��ɫ.

The researchers used whole genome sequencing of 180 common carpenter bees – Ceratina calcarata – to look at their population genetics, metagenome and microbiome, as well the impact of environmental stressors across the Greater Toronto Area. These small carpenter bees are wild and native bees, not managed and non-native bees, such as a honeybees.

They also found significant environmental variation in bee microbiomes and nutritional resources even in the absence of genetic differentiation.

“Parasite and pathogen infections in bees are a major driver in global bee population declines and this is further exacerbated by urbanization and a loss of habitat and degraded habitat. There are things, though, that cities could do to help wild bees,” says lead author 91��ɫ PhD student Katherine D. Chau.

“We found the best way to connect bee habitats and create conditions for more genetic diversity is through green spaces, shrubs and scrub. Conservation efforts focussed on retaining and creating these habitat connectors could go a long way toward helping wild bee health.”

Although bees are the most prominent pollinators, cities could impact all insect pollinators, which pollinate more than 87 per cent of flowering plants and 75 per cent of food crops globally. Cities, unlike rural areas, also create an urban heat island effect – higher temperatures in the city than those in the surrounding areas – and this affects flowering times and growing season length. This could lead to flowers, for example, blooming before or after bees are out and foraging.

The higher number of pathogen and parasite infections in urban areas can also be attributed to disease spill over. Because the bees are concentrated in certain areas, infected bees are more likely to contaminate the flowers they visit, which then spreads the infection to the next bee that visits that flower, even across bee species, say the researchers.

“Our research is the first known whole genome sequencing, population genomic and metagenomic study of a wild, solitary bee in an urban context, which looks at the complex relationship between bees, metagenomic interactions and dense urban landscapes,” says Rehan. “This approach provides a tool to assess not only the overall health of wild bees in urban settings but could also be applied across a broad range of wildlife and landscapes.”

Now that several known bee and plant pathogens have been identified in dense urban areas, the researchers say it paves the way for early detection and monitoring of threats to wildlife in cities.

“Future studies should explore the link between reduced genetic diversity and the fitness of wild bees in cities,” says Chau.

The paper, , was published in the journal Global Change Biology.

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TORONTO, July 7, 2020 – What causes African hybrid honey bees (AHB), also known as killer bees, to be highly defensive and aggressive? 91��ɫ researchers have found it was the mixing of African and European genetics that led to hyper-aggression in this invasive strain of honey bees.

AHBs are a genetics experiment gone wrong. Researchers in Brazil imported a honey bee subspecies from South African and bred them with European-derived honey bees in the 1950s. The idea was to develop a better subtropical honey bee, but bees escaped and mated with the local bees.

“The resulting bees were highly invasive and aggressive, much more than the European honey bees used by North and South American beekeepers at the time,” says Associate Professor of the Faculty of Science, a co-author on the paper led by previous 91��ɫ PhD student , now an assistant professor at Purdue University. “The genetics causing this hyper defensiveness were not well known, but the prevailing wisdom was that killer bees are aggressive because South African bees are aggressive.”

Professor Amro Zayed in his Faculty of Science lab

The new AHB colonies rapidly reproduced and spread across, not only Brazil, but South America, Central America and, by 1990, the southern United States. Today, they have completely replaced the European-derived honey bee in Brazil and are the most common honey bee from Northern Argentina to the southern United States.

The research team measured the defence response of 116 Brazilian AHB colonies using the Suede Ball test (see by one of the researchers, Samir Kadri, a former 91��ɫ visiting PhD student from Brazil). A suede ball is gently swung for one minute in front of the colony entrance stimulating a defense response in the bees and encouraging additional bees to sting the ball.

“We sequenced the genomes of the most aggressive colonies, which would sting the ball 90 times or more per minute, and the least aggressive colonies,” says Harpur. “We then compared the genomes of the most and least aggressive colonies to identify mutations that associate with these differences in behaviour.”

“The most defensive colonies in our study were more related to South African honey bees except at several regions of their genome that influence aggression. Here, they were more related to honey bees from Western Europe,” says Zayed. “That is – it was the mixing of these two honey bee subspecies that led to hyper aggression.”

How DNA from these two subspecies interacts to influence defense response is an important next question.

The was published in the journal .

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91��ɫ champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact:

Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-272-6317, sandramc@yorku.ca

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TORONTO, ON, Aug. 13, 2018 – By sequencing the genome of the yellow-banded bumblebee, 91��ɫ researchers have found that inbreeding and disease are likely culprits in their rapid decline in North America.

This is believed to be the first time the genome of an at-risk bumblebee has been sequenced and it allows researchers to take a deeper look into the potential reason for their diminishing numbers. What they found surprised them.

“The yellow-banded bumblebee has been declining throughout much of its range in North America, but we don’t know why,” says 91��ɫ U Associate Professor , Research Chair in Genomics in the Faculty of Science. “We sequenced their genome so we can search for any clues of why the bumblebee is declining.”

Those clues show that bumblebees are inbreeding, and their immune genes are under selection, which points to disease as a likely cause of the stress.

The , Bombus terricola, is listed as vulnerable to extinction globally on the recently updated Red List of Threatened Species. It is part of a subgenus of bumblebees that includes the rusty-patched bumblebee, which is almost extinct now in Canada. The last sighting of one was in 2009.

“This particular bumblebee is down to about 10 per cent of its former numbers. It used to be one of our most common bumblebees in Southern Ontario. When we created the genome, we looked for signs of inbreeding and unfortunately that’s what we found. Bumblebees in Southern Ontario and mid-northern Quebec are becoming more inbred,” says 91��ɫ U biology researcher Clement Kent, who led the research.

“As bees become more inbred, they encounter difficulties maintaining their populations, but as their populations gets smaller, they have difficulties avoiding inbreeding. So that is one risk factor that could accelerate their decline. And finding as much inbreeding as we did, is a sure sign that this population is declining rapidly.”

With inbred bees, males can become infertile and when they mate with the queen, they often won’t produce any offspring at all or if the male genes are too closely related to the queen, they may produce sterile males instead of worker bees. “That means she may only have half as many workers to build the colony then needed,” says Kent.

But the other piece of the puzzle is disease. “If it is disease knocking down these bees, we should see signs of strong selection on genes that are involved with the immune system of bees, and that in fact is what we found,” says Kent.

Out of the 46 bumblebee species in North America, one in four are at risk of extinction and that includes the yellow-banded, the western and the rusty-patched bumblebees.

“What this research does is give us a tool that can show us that pathogen spillover or disease outbreak could explain why these populations declined in Southern Ontario and Quebec. It’s useful because the rusty-patched bumblebee is thought to have declined by a disease outbreak, but I’ve only found two in Canada since 2005. Something like this gives us another way of testing why these bees are declining when it’s really hard to locate them, let alone sample them in the wild,” says 91��ɫ U Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES).

“It’s like detective work to find out why native bumblebees are declining. For this research to find things at the genetic level that we’ve been looking at at the landscape level, is surprising, and adds support as another line of evidence.”

Researchers believe the disease is originating from managed bumblebees used in greenhouses for crops such as tomatoes and sweet peppers. Managed bumblebees have more disease than wild bees. These managed bee forage outside the greenhouses for nectar and could be spreading disease through the flowers they visit.

The research is published in the journal . It was funded by Wildlife Preservation Canada, along with a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada discovery grant.

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91��ɫ��champions new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-disciplinary programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 25 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 300,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon Campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education. ��

Media Contact:
Sandra McLean, 91��ɫ Media Relations, 416-736-2100 ext. 22097, sandramc@yorku.ca

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TORONTO, Tuesday, July 4, 2017 – Beta blockers are commonly used world-wide to treat a variety of cardiovascular conditions, such as arrhythmias and heart failure. Scientists have known for decades that the medications work by slowing the heart rate and reducing the force of contraction – lessening the burden of work carried out by the heart. However, new research out of 91��ɫ has now shown that these drugs also reverse a number of potentially detrimental genetic changes associated with heart disease.

Using an experimental model of heart failure and next generation sequencing to get a snapshot of all of the RNA in the heart cells, the researchers identified the global gene expression changes that occur in heart failure. Then they explored what happened to this pattern of gene expression when beta blocker treatment was implemented, and what they found not only surprised them, but could have important ramifications for future treatments of heart disease.

“We discovered that beta blockers largely reverse the pathological pattern of gene expression observed in heart failure,” said Faculty of Science Professor John McDermott, who led the research, along with 91��ɫ U collaborators Professor Gary Sweeney and Professor Jorg Grigull. “This could mean that the reversal or suppression of pathological gene expression by beta blockers is somehow protective against heart failure, but it’s something we would need to look into further to understand how individual genes function in the heart.”

Interestingly, the study also found that some genes associated with the immune system were dysregulated in heart failure, supporting recent research that has suggested the immune system and inflammation are involved in heart disease.

About 600,000 Canadians are living with heart failure, and the disease is expected to rise as more people survive heart attacks and other heart conditions and continue to live longer.

McDermott and his team have identified genes that will be further explored for their potential use in diagnosis and treatment in heart failure.

The study, “Heart Failure and MEF2 Transcriptome Dynamics in Response to B-Blockers,” was published today in .

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91��ɫ is known for championing new ways of thinking that drive teaching and research excellence. Our students receive the education they need to create big ideas that make an impact on the world. Meaningful and sometimes unexpected careers result from cross-discipline programming, innovative course design and diverse experiential learning opportunities. 91��ɫ students and graduates push limits, achieve goals and find solutions to the world’s most pressing social challenges, empowered by a strong community that opens minds. 91��ɫ U is an internationally recognized research university – our 11 faculties and 26 research centres have partnerships with 200+ leading universities worldwide. Located in Toronto, 91��ɫ is the third largest university in Canada, with a strong community of 53,000 students, 7,000 faculty and administrative staff, and more than 295,000 alumni. 91��ɫ U's fully bilingual Glendon campus is home to Southern Ontario's Centre of Excellence for French Language and Bilingual Postsecondary Education.

Media Contact:

Gloria Suhasini, Media Relations, 416 736 2100 ext. 22094, suhasini@yorku.ca

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