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Welcome to Amro Zayed’s Lab @ the Department of Biology, York University.
Research in the lab will mostly focus on examining the genetic basis of behavior in the highly social and extremely intriguing societies of the honey bee Apis mellifera. Our goal is to understand both the “How’s” and “Why’s” of the evolution of social behavior. Our three-pronged research approach involves
- Identifying the causal genes and gene networks affecting behavior through quantitative genetic analysis of line crosses, global transcriptional profiling, and network analyses.
- Studying the molecular evolution of the identified gene networks to determine the relative contribution of selection and drift, and cis- versus trans- regulation, in phenotypic and behavioural evolution.
- Manipulation of the identified gene networks to examine their effect on individual and colony fitness.
In addition to charting the genotype-phenotype map in the honey bee, there are several interesting prospects for testing the hypotheses developed from our honey bee work to the primitively social sweat bees, which we plan on developing genomic resources for.
Finally, our lab will continue to explore some interesting topics relating to the fitness consequences of complementary sex determination in the Hymenoptera. Sex in bees is determined by genotype at a single locus: heterozygous bees develop into diploid females, while hemizygous (i.e. having one copy of the sex determination gene) bees develop into haploid males. Homozygous individuals ‘fool’ the sex-determination locus into producing the male phenotype from a fertilized diploid egg normally reserved for producing females. Diploid males have drastically reduced fitness (i.e. they are usually inviable or effectively sterile), and can severely impact the viability of small bee populations. Our lab will extend work on this subject by examining the dynamics of genetic diversity at the sex locus under realistic population structure (using theory and simulation), in addition to examining if bees have evolved mechanisms to reduce the cost associated with diploid male production.
Thank you for visiting our webpage. Please check out the Lab News link for the latest updates on our research.
