Tracing bees using radiotransmitters

Public release date: 26-May-2010
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Contact: Jen Laloup
jlaloup@plos.org
415-624-1220
Public Library of Science

Researchers learn about role of bees in tropical ecosystems using radio transmitters
A New York State Museum scientist is one of several researchers who have become the first to use tiny radio transmitters to track bees over long distances in a forest habitat, yielding new insight into the role of bees in tropical forest ecosystems. The bee study research conducted by Dr. Roland Kays, the Museum's curator of mammals, and the other scientists, was published in the online peer reviewed journal PLoS ONE on May 26th.

Armed with radio antennas, Kays and the other researchers worked at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) in Panama City, Panama, to track unique signals from tiny transmitters glued to individual orchid bees. Although radar had been used to track bees in open areas, this is the first time it has been used in forested habitats. The research opens the door to future studies of bees in temperate forests, such as those in New York State.

Bees are important pollinators for plants worldwide. Pollination is critical for trees to make fruits and seeds, including domesticated edible fruits, as well as inedible species that are found in most New York State forest habitats. However, little is known about the movement of bees because they are so small and difficult to track.

Researchers, using helicopters, discovered that the orchid bees traveled surprisingly long distances, zipping through increasingly scarce patches of tropical forest as they moved pollen between rare flowers that grew miles apart.

"People disrupt plant pollination as they disturb and destroy tropical forests," said David Roubik, senior staff scientist at the Smithsonian. "Radio-tracking significantly improves our understanding of bees and the plants they pollinate. Now we can track orchid bees to get at the distances and spatial patterns involved—vital details which have completely eluded researchers in the past."

The researchers chose 17 iridescent blue-green orchid bees called Exaerete frontalis -- fairly common in the forest. They are larger than New York state honeybees but similar to some of the state's other large bumble bees. Roubik determined that Panama's orchid bees weigh only 0.6 grams without nectar in their stomachs.

"These bees easily carry a 300 mg radio transmitter glued on their backs," said Martin Wikelski, co-author of the research paper and director of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology, professor at Princeton University and Smithsoian research associate. "By following the radio signals, we discovered that male orchid bees spent most of their time in small core areas, but could take off and visit areas farther away. One male even crossed over the shipping lanes in the Panama Canal, flying at least five kilometres, and returned a few days later."

In the past, researchers have struggled to determine the distances that bees travel, following individuals marked with paint between baits, or using radar, which doesn't work well when trees are in the way. "Carrying the transmitter could reduce the distance that the bees travel, but even if the flight distances we record are the minimum distances that these orchid bees can fly, they are impressive, long-distance movements," said Kays, who is also a research associate at STRI. "These data help to explain how orchids these bees pollinate can be so rare."

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STRI, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the New York State Museum and the National Geographic Society provided support for the bee study. Other co-authors are affiliated with the University of Arizona, Tucson; Cornell University and EcolSciences, Inc. In addition to hand tracking bees, Wikelski, Kays and colleagues have set up the Automated Radio Telemetry System on Barro Colorado Island (IS THIS IN PANAMA). The system is available to interested researchers and is capable of tracking up to 200 different animals, 24 hours a day, at any given time. A unit of the Smithsonian Institution, STRI furthers the understanding of tropical nature and its importance to human welfare, trains students to conduct research in the tropics and promotes conservation by increasing public awareness of the beauty and importance of tropical ecosystems. More information is available at www.stri.org.

Citation: Wikelski M, Moxley J, Eaton-Mordas A, Lo´ pez-Uribe MM, Holland R, et al. (2010) Large-Range Movements of Neotropical Orchid Bees Observed via Radio Telemetry. PLoS ONE 5(5): e10738. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0010738

Funding: The study was supported by the US Environmental Protection Agency, New York State Museum, EcolSciences, Inc., Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and the National Geographic Society. EcolSciences, as the only commercial company among the funding organizations, had a role in the analysis, decision to publish, and preparation of the manuscript through the involvment of David Moskowitz.

Competing Interests: David Moskowitz is employed by EcolSciences, who is a funder of this research. The employment of this author in a commercial company does not alter the authors' adherence to all the PLoS ONE policies on sharing data and materials, as detailed online in the guide for authors.

Contact:
Joanne Guilmette
Jguilmet@mail.nysed.gov
518/474-8730

PLEASE LINK TO THE SCIENTIFIC ARTICLE IN ONLINE VERSIONS OF YOUR REPORT (URL goes live after the embargo ends): http://dx.plos.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0010738

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New pathway to cheap insulin

This paper deserves wide publicity as it reveals a cheaper method of making insulin

K.S.Parthasarathy



Public release date: 26-May-2010
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Contact: Bastian Dornbach
bastian.dornbach@helmholtz-hzi.de
49-053-161-811-407
Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres

New pathway to cheap insulin
Researchers from Helmholtz Centre in Braunschweig, Germany, publish new and more efficient method to manufacture insulin
More than eight million diabetics live in Germany. Diabetes is not restricted to our prosperous society and the highest growth rates often occur in countries with aspiring economies such as in Asia. Worldwide, more than 285 million people suffer from this illness; with 50 million diabetics, India is the country with the most people affected by this disease. In Europe, Germany shows the highest prevalence in the population with twelve percent. In a German-Indo collaboration, researchers from the Helmholtz-Centre for Infection Research (HZI) in Braunschweig, Germany have now developed a new method to cheaply produce insulin for the treatment of diabetes. The group's results have now been published in the open access online research magazine Microbial Cell Factories. With this, all information is freely accessible for everyone and is not subject to patent law.

"As we did last year with an alternative protocol for the development of a hepatitis B vaccine, we again decided to use this way and make our knowledge available for everybody," says Ursula Rinas from the HZI, who chairs the German side of the project. Thus, people can access "insider-information" that makes it possible to cheaply produce medicine which in return can be affordable to people in developing countries.

The researchers wanted to develop a new procedure to increase the yield of an insulin precursor from which the actual insulin can be obtained, and in this way reduce costs. They found the yeast Pichia pastoris and modified the cells so that they produce the building block for insulin while growing on a special medium. The results were highly gratifying: "With our procedure, Pichia pastoris delivers high yields – twice as much as known before", says Ursula Rinas. "Already with few cells it is possible to produce a lot of the insulin precursor."

In the early 1980s, insulin was the first recombinant product approved by the FDA for human application. Today, human insulin is produced as recombinant protein, using two major routes. One route involves the production of the insulin precursor using the bacterium Escherichia coli as expression host with complex subsequent isolation, solubilization and refolding procedures. The other route involves the well-known baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The advantage of the latter route lies in the secretion of a soluble insulin precursor into the culture supernatant, making it easier for isolation and chemical modification. The newly described method from Ursula Rinas and her group also uses this route. The isolation of the precursor from the culture supernatant is only followed by enzymatic finishing. Insulin produced with this new method can be used normally and is identical to human insulin. Currently, the researchers are working on a method to produce a vaccine against dengue fever using the same system as described here.

For most people in developing countries medicine is too expensive. The purchasing of insulin in those countries is often cost prohibitive. Another problem is patent law that makes it impossible to recreate medicine and sell it at low prices. Once a patent has expired, as is the case with insulin, the so called generic drugs can be produced cheaply. Unfortunately, emerging nations very often lack the insider knowledge to produce those generics.


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Original article: Application of simple fed-batch technique to high-level secretory production of insulin precursor using Pichia pastoris with subsequent purification and conversion to human insulin. Gurramkonda C, Polez S, Skoko N, Adnan A, Gabel T, Chugh D, Swaminathan S, Khanna N, Tisminetzky S, Rinas U. Microb Cell Fact. 2010 May 12;9(1):31. [Epub ahead of print]





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Lowly termite, not the lion or elephant, may be the star of Africa's savanna

It is an interesting observation. Termites are more important to the ecosystem that huge animals
K S Parthasarathy





Lowly termite, not the lion or elephant, may be the star of Africa's savanna

GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- The majestic animals most closely associated with the African savanna -- fierce lions, massive elephants, towering giraffes – may be relatively minor players when it comes to shaping the ecosystem.

The king of the savanna appears to be the termite, say ecologists who've found that these humble creatures contribute mightily to grassland productivity in central Kenya via a network of uniformly distributed colonies. Termite mounds greatly enhance plant and animal activity at the local level, while their even distribution over a larger area maximizes ecosystem-wide productivity.

The finding, published this week in the journal PLoS Biology, affirms a counterintuitive approach to population ecology: Often, it's the small things that matter most.

"One of the kind of typical things I think that people think about is, what drives a savanna in terms of its structure and function?" said Todd Palmer, one of the paper's authors and an assistant professor of biology at the University of Florida."We think about big animals, but these termites are having a massive impact on the system from below."

Said Robert M. Pringle, a research fellow at Harvard University and the lead author, "As (famed biologist) E.O. Wilson likes to point out, in many respects it's the little things that run the world."

Prior research on the Kenya dwarf gecko initially drew Pringle's attention to the peculiar role of grassy termite mounds, which in this part of Kenya are some 30 feet in diameter and spaced some 180 to 300 feet apart. Each mound teems with millions of termites, who build the mounds over the course of centuries.

After observing unexpectedly high numbers of lizards in the vicinity of mounds, Pringle, Palmer and their colleagues began to quantify ecological productivity relative to mound density. They found that each mound supported dense aggregations of flora and fauna: Plants grew more rapidly the closer they were to mounds, and animal populations and reproductive rates fell off appreciably with greater distance.

What was observed on the ground was even clearer in satellite imagery. Each mound – relatively inconspicuous on the Kenyan grassland – stood at the center of a burst of floral productivity. More important, these bursts were highly organized in relation to one another, evenly dispersed as if squares on a checkerboard. The result is an optimized network of plant and animal output closely tied to the ordered distribution of termite mounds.

"In essence, the highly regular spatial pattern of fertile mounds generated by termites actually increases overall levels of ecosystem production. And it does so in such a profound way," Palmer said. "Seen from above, the grid-work of termite mounds in the savanna is not just a pretty picture. The over-dispersion, or regular distribution of these termite mounds, plays an important role in elevating the services this ecosystem provides."

The mechanism through which termite activity is transformed into far-reaching effects on the ecosystem is a complex one. Pringle and Palmer suspect termites import coarse particles into the otherwise fine soil in the vicinity of their mounds. These coarser particles promote water infiltration of the soil, even as they discourage disruptive shrinking and swelling of topsoil in response to precipitation or drought.

The mounds also show elevated levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen. All this beneficial soil alteration appears to directly and indirectly mold ecosystem services far beyond the immediate vicinity of the mound.

While further studies will explore the mechanism through which these spatial patterns of termite mounds emerge, Pringle and Palmer suggest that the present work has implications beyond the basic questions of ecology.

"Termites are typically viewed as pests, and as threats to agricultural and livestock production," Pringle said. "But productivity – of both wild and human-dominated landscapes – may be more intricately tied to the pattern-generating organisms of the larger natural landscape than is commonly understood."

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Pringle and Palmer's co-authors on the PLoS Biology paper are Daniel F. Doak of the Mpala Research Centre and the University of Wyoming; Alison K. Brody of the Mpala Research Centre and the University of Vermont; and Rudy Jocqué of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium. Their work was supported by the Sherwood Family Foundation and the National Science Foundation.