No evidence that DNA methylation is associated with the regulation of fertility in the adult honey bee Apis mellifera (Hymenoptera: Apidae) worker ovary.

Epigenetic modifications, mediated by DNA methylation, are involved in caste differentiation between queen and worker honey bees, Apis mellifera. This study uses methylation sensitive amplified fragment length polymorphism (MS-AFLP) to investigate whether genome-wide DNA methylation is implicated in the regulation of honey bee worker sterility and whether CO2 narcosis, which suppresses ovary activation in queenless workers, influences DNA methylation. Queenless workers were divided into control and experimental (CO2 narcosis) cages. We compared MS-AFLP patterns in CO2-treated and non-treated workers with and without activated ovaries at 4 h, 2 and 7 days after treatment. While there was evidence of DNA methylation in all samples, there was no detectable difference in genome-wide methylation patterns between any treatment comparisons. This suggests that mechanisms that regulate worker sterility in the adult honey bee worker are not related to genome-wide methylation, and that CO2 narcosis does not significantly affect DNA methylation patterns in the worker ovary. However, because DNA methylation is sparse in the honey bee, and because MS-AFLP detects only a proportion of methylated sites, it remains possible that a subset of genes that are responsible for the regulation of worker sterility are differentially methylated, but that we failed to pick these up in our genome-wide scan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]