ABSCISIC ACID CONTENT VARIES DURING Apis mellifera DEVELOPMENT: IN THE SEARCH FOR A FUNCTIONAL SENSE

RAMÍREZ, LEONOR; NEGRI PEDRO; MAGGI MATÍAS; EGUARAS MARTÍN; LAMATTINA LORENZO

Mar del Plata

Congreso; 51 Annual Meeting Argentine Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; 2015

The honeybee (Apis mellifera) obtains all the nutritional needs from nectar and pollen from a wide diversity of plantspecies. Nectar is the source of carbohydrates and pollen provides proteins, lipids and other nutrients required forgrowth and immunity. Abscisic acid (ABA) is a fundamental hormone involved in diverse physiological processes inplants. It has been also demonstrated that ABA is functionally active in many animal species where its specificreceptor LANCL2 was characterized. In a recent publication (Negri et al., 2015), we demonstrated that honeybeecolonies supplemented with ABA improve their fitness and enhance individual immune response. In thispresentation, we report that ABA is a natural compound present in honey, royal jelly, larvae and adult honeybees. Wefound that ABA content and the transcript levels of its putative receptor, AmLANCL2, are higher in adult honeybeescompared to larvae. Our results show that ABA supplementation would not influence the development of A. melliferagrowing in the lab under standardized conditions (34 °C). However, the delay of the larvae development exposed tolow temperature (25 °C) was reversed by supplementation with ABA. Furthermore, ABA treatment increased thenumber of surviving individuals exposed to 25 °C and also shortened the recovery time of individuals after expositionto short periods of low temperatures