The��study, published yesterday in the , sheds light on how worker bees – who are sterile – evolved charismatic and cooperative behaviours such as nursing young bees, collecting food for the colony, defending it against intruders and dancing to communicate the location of profitable flowers to nestmates.

California high desert honey bees pollinating a yellow beavertail cactus flower. Photo: Jesse Eastland, Wikimedia Commons

When 91��ɫ researchers examined the honey bee genome, they discovered that the genes associated with worker behaviour were found in areas of the genome that have the highest rate of recombination. Recombination represents a shuffling of the genetic deck: recombination in the ovaries of a queen shuffles the chromosomes she inherited from her parents. As a result, the queen’s female offspring are likely to inherit mosaic chromosomes with different combinations of mutations, says 91��ɫ biology Professor Amro Zayed, whose lab conducted the research.

Recombination allows natural selection to act on specific mutations without regard to neighbouring mutations.

91��ɫ biology Professor Amro Zayed

“If I’m a good rower in a dragon boat with 49 poor rowers, I am going to lose all of my races. ��But if teams were shuffled after every race, I’ll likely have a better chance of winning. I may even get to be in a boat with 49 good rowers just like myself,” says Zayed. “The same thing happens with mutations on a chromosome. ��Recombination makes the evolutionary fate of mutations independent of their surrounding neighbours, which enhances the process of natural selection.”.

The team believes that they have solved one of the mysteries of the honey bee’s genome, says postdoctoral research associate Clement Kent, lead author on the study.

“The honey bee has the highest rates of recombination in animals – ten times higher than humans. ��Our study shows that this high degree of genetic shuffling has turned on the evolutionary faucet in parts of the bee genome responsible for orchestrating worker behaviour,” says Kent. ��“This can allow natural selection to increase the fitness of honey bee colonies, which live or die based on how well their workers ‘behave’.”

The study, “Recombination is associated with the evolution of genome structure and worker behavior in honey bees” was coauthored by Kent, Zayed, and graduate students Shermineh Minaei and Brock Harpur. The research was funded by the and the Province of Ontario.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Why do plankton matter? 91��ɫ biology Professor Norman Yan, the study’s senior author,��says these��tiny creatures are critical to our survival. “Without plankton, humans would be quite hungry and perhaps even dead. Much of the world's photosynthesis, the basis of all of our food, comes from the ocean's plankton. The oxygen in every other breath we take is a product of phytoplankton photosynthesis,” says Yan.

Norman Yan

Yan together with the study's lead author Howard Riessen, a professor of biology at SUNY College at Buffalo studied the effect of changes in water chemistry on plankton prey defenses. Specifically, they examined how lower calcium concentrations affect Daphnia (water flea) exoskeleton development. These low calcium levels are caused by loss of calcium from forest soils, a consequence of decades of acid rain and multiple cycles of logging and forest growth. The results are published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Daphnia pulex

“At low calcium levels the organisms grow slower and cannot build their armour,” says Riessen.��“Without suitable armour, they are vulnerable to ambush by predators,” he says.

“Calcium is a critical element for Daphnia and many other crustaceans,” Riessen says. “Daphnia build their exoskeletons, which include some defensive spines, with calcium to protect themselves from predators. Where calcium levels are low, the Daphnia have softer, smaller, exoskeletons with fewer defensive spines, making them an easy snack.”

This phenomenon of reduced calcium is also playing out on a much larger scale in the world’s oceans,��notes Yan. “Increases in ocean acidity are complicating calcium acquisition by marine life, which is an under-reported effect of global carbon dioxide emissions. Thus marine plankton may also find themselves more vulnerable to predators,” he says.

Howard Riessen

The public is used to stories about changes in water chemistry that lead to large-scale fish kills, says Riessen. “These changes are more insidious. Daphnia might not be a household name, but they are food for fish, and they help keep our lakes clean. Changing the balance between Daphnia and their predators marks a major change in lake systems.”

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Many people overestimate the size of one serving of food as defined in Canada’s Food Guide, so they may be overeating even if they believe they are being careful, according to a study by Jennifer Kuk, a professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, and lead author Sharona Abramovitch, a former graduate student at 91��ɫ. The study was published online Tuesday in the journal .

Canada’s Food Guide is an important tool used by many general practitioners to help their patients eat more healthfully, says Kuk, so it made sense to study whether people would be able to tell from the food guide if they are eating enough of the four food groups: vegetables and fruit, meat and alternatives, grain products, and milk and alternatives.

Jennifer Kuk

“What we found was that the way people estimate one serving is essentially how much they would normally eat at one time,” says Kuk. “The majority of participants in the study inaccurately thought they would need to increase their food consumption by approximately 400 calories to meet recommendations in Canada’s Food Guide. This suggests we either need to change the size of a serving in the Guide – which has remained almost the same since 1977 – or educate Canadians more about how much food they should be consuming in a day.”

That eight-ounce steak you throw on the barbeque this summer, for example, alone exceeds the Canada Food Guide’s maximum daily allowance for meat and alternatives, says Abramovitch, a former graduate student in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health. And only half a cup of cooked pasta is one of the eight grain servings allowed per day for a male between the ages of 19 and 50.

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Researchers analyzed food records from the 145 participants in the study, which included White, Black, South Asian and East Asian adults. They were asked to select what they thought was a serving, and researchers measured it to see whether the serving size corresponded with Canada’s Food Guide. They were also asked to estimate how much of something – for example, pasta – they would eat at one sitting, and to recall their diet over 24 hours.

All four ethnic groups inaccurately estimated the total number of servings they were eating in a day: they underestimated the number of servings of fruit and vegetables, grain products and meat, and overestimated the number of servings of milk and alternatives they were eating.

The research was funded by the Heart & Stroke Foundation.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Kent, president of the Horticultural Societies of Parkdale and Toronto, founded the Pollinator Garden Project two years ago to teach gardeners, members of the public and school children how to create and conserve habitat for pollinators.

A postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Biology in 91��ɫ’s , he is the only Canadian to receive the award this year from the (NAPPC). The NAPPC is made up of more than 120 groups of scientists, researchers, conservationists, government officials and volunteers who lead programs to protect pollinators.

“A pollinator garden is a garden that maximizes chances for food, nesting, and survival, for any kind of pollinator – so we are not focused on just bees, or birds, or butterflies,” says Kent. “That means it needs to have leaves that caterpillars eat, flowers chosen specifically for hummingbirds, and nesting sites like stems, or places in the ground for bees.”

He and a team of volunteers have planted pollinator gardens in Toronto’s High Park and other city parks and worked through the winter to prepare a pollinator garden for the Canada Blooms garden show in March, where they distributed Kent’s guide How to Plant a Pollinator Garden. They have also taken the pollinator guide to schools and planted pollinator gardens at four Toronto elementary schools.

A gardener for many years, Kent left a successful career in the software industry to earn a PhD in biology. He now uses his background in math to do genetics and genomics research in Professor at 91��ɫ.

“I found myself working in a lab at 91��ɫ where Professor Bridget Stutchbury, who wrote Silence of the Songbirds, is down the hall. In the other direction is Professor Laurence Packer, who wrote Keeping the Bees. A lot of what they are talking about is habitat,” says Kent. “I recognized that gardens can be very good habitat if they are managed properly, so I decided to spread the word.”

The NAPPC will present Kent’s award at an international conference at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in late October.

For information, visit the�� �ɱ�������ٱ�.������

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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All talks, unless otherwise specified, take place in the McLaughlin Senior Common Room, 140 McLaughlin College, at noon. The talks are free and open to anyone in the 91��ɫ community.

�մǻ岹��,��Ian Greene (left), master of McLaughlin College, will speak about his volunteer activities in Ethiopia for a Canadian nonprofit organization that helps at-risk children obtain adequate food, shelter and an education so that they can go to school, then university, and then contribute to Ethiopia’s rejuvenation. Find out what you can do to contribute.On��Thursday Sept.��22,��L. H. Gummi justice of the high court of Nigeria along with��several other high court judge, will speak on the differences and similarities between the Nigerian court and the Supreme Court of Canada, which was a model for the Nigerian High Court when it was established.��

Lieutenant-General (Ret’d) George Macdonald (right), the former vice-chief of the Canadian Defence staff,��will speak on Sept. 23 about the��current challenges facing the Canadian Forces as they transition from a combat mission in Afghanistan, deal with the pressures of reduced government funding, and try to manage within a very cumbersome procurement system. Macdonald, a Fellow of McLaughlin College, spent 38 years in the Canadian Forces, retiring in 2004 after three years as the vice chief of the defence staff. He began his military career as a fighter pilot and has occupied staff and command positions at several levels. He has served with NATO in Germany and Norway, and with NORAD in Canada and at Colorado Springs in the US. He currently works as a consultant in defence and security issues in Ottawa.

On��Tuesday, Oct. 25, Sandra Vides Martinez,��a senior student in International Development Studies and��in the Faculty of Education at 91��ɫ, will compare her experiences of working with youth in a Peruvian orphanage and her experiences of working with youth in Toronto. She will be facilitating discussions surrounding the importance of breaking down biases when working with at-risk youth in marginalized communities in conjunction with developing programs that are based on participatory development and capacity building.��Vides Martinez��will draw on her experiences in working with communities in Toronto as well as her work with McLaughlin College's Human Rights, Participatory Growth and Poverty Eradication Project.��

Gregory Tardi, legal counsel to the House of Commons, will speak on Monday, Oct. 31 about��“Accountability to Law as an Aspect of Democracy.”

Then on Thursday, Nov. 24, Tahera Aurban-Ali, who is a 91��ɫ student and a Canadian who was��born in Afghanistan, will provide her passionate analysis of the situation in Afghanistan. She argues that allied (including Canadian) intervention has done a lot of good to promote human rights, but we should be wary of compromises made with the Taliban.

On Wednesday, Nov. 30,��James Sheptycki (right), a professor of criminology at 91��ɫ, will speak about his 20-year career researching transnational crime and policing. This talk coincides with the publication of two new books Transnational Crime and Policing' (Ashgate, 2011) and Global Policing, co-authored with Ben Bowling, professor of criminology at King's College, London (Sage, 2011). In his talk, Sheptycki will reflect upon the role of the researcher the study of "the police" and how this is effected by "globalization".

A��light lunch is served at noon and the talks usually begin at about 12:15pm, followed by a question-and-answer session. Each talk usually finishes shortly after 1pm.

For information on subsequent lunch talk schedules, visit the McLaughlin College website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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