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By Amro, November 15, 2014

Congratulation to Nadia Tsvetkov for successfully defending her MSc thesis on learning and memory in honey bees. Nadia’s wrote a very nice review on the genetic of learning and memory in honey bees and conducted a very neat study on how social interaction influence learning and memory. She also led the development of a very neat assay to measure spatial memory in honey bees.

Her MSc degree was awarded with distinction (Top 5%).

Nadia has decided to stick around and do her PhD in the Zayedlab… She is currently leading a large scale study on how agrochemicals affect brain gene expression and behaviour of honey bees in Canada.

Congrats Nadia!

Nadia Tsvetkov, MSc

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By Amro, September 8, 2014

Happy to welcome Samir Moura Kadri, a visiting PhD student from São Paulo State University from Botucatu, Brazil . We are hosting Samir here for the Fall 2014 and Winter 2015 terms to study the genetics of aggression in Africanized ‘Killer’ bees! Africanized bees are very defensive, and Samir studied variation in defensiveness across a large number of colonies in Brazil. He is here to apply genomics to understand the genetics of defensiveness in his colonies.

Here is a picture of Samir and a histogram of a measure of colony defensiveness in his study… the number of stings per minute!… yes, the upper limit is 100+ stings per minute… which is pretty nasty…

Thankfully, it was not 100 stings per minute that Samir actually received; he got the data by swinging a little suede-wrapped ball in front of the colonies… brave man! The range of defensive behaviour is very wide… about an order of magnitude difference between ‘happy go lucky africanized colonies ~ 20 stings per minute’ to ‘super aggressive killer bees – 120 stings per min’… bodes well for the genomic study!

Welcome Samir!
Amro

Samir and his ‘killer’ bees

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By Amro, August 29, 2014

Happy to announce a new publication from the lab on the immune system of honey bees in PLoS ONE. The study explored the genetic relationship between the honey bee’s innate and social immune system. The study was authored by PhD candidate Brock Harpur, with strong contributions from Anna Chernyshova and Arash Soltani – two honours thesis students in my lab (2012). MSc Candidate Nadia Tsvetkov and NSERC USRA students Mohammad and Jack (Zhixing) were instrumental in completing the field-work .

A general summary of the research will follow in a few days…

Amro

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By Amro, August 23, 2014

Hello,
Happy to announce BeeCon3 – Southern Ontario Bee Researchers Symposium – to be held at York University On August 29th 2014.

Here is a link for the full program, BeeCon 2014 program

Program: 

[table id=1 /]

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By Amro, August 1, 2014

Congrats to Brock for winning the 3rd place award for best student talk at the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution’s meeting in Montreal last May. Brock presented some of his PhD research on population genomics of the honey bee.

Check out CSEE’s summer bulletin for the official announcement.

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By Amro, July 8, 2014

Just as the FIFA world cup winds down, the world cup of social insects starts in Cairns, Australia! The International Union for the Study of Social Insects (IUSSI) holds an international congress every 4 years. If you happen to be in Cairns – or if you want a good excuse to visit Cairns …. other than the barrier reef, tropical weather, rainforest, nice folks…. come check out the IUSSI Congress from the 13th to the 18th of July.

Lab members are on 5 presentations, including:

OR166

Molecular evolution of the honeybee brain transcription regulatory network. Daria Molodtsova, Amro Zayed, Tuesday, Meeting Room 4, 11:30 am
[I’ll probably give that talk as Daria can’t make it]

OR222

Population genomics of the honeybee, Apis mellifera. Brock Harpur, Clement Kent, Amro Zayed, Wednesday, Meeting Room 2, 11:00 am

OR282

Population genomic approaches for studying the evolution of sociality. Amro Zayed, Thursday, meeting room 3, 10:45 am

OR388

Seek and Ye Shall Find: Seeking selection for sociality. Clement Kent, Amro Zayed, Karl Glastad, Karen Kapheim, Friday, Meeting Room 4, 11:00 am [Former postdoc Dr. Clement Kent will be talking about a Robinson/Kapheim/Goodisman/Zayed lab collaboration]

OR385

SNP identification of Africanized honeybees. Nadine C Chapman, Julie Lim, Amro Zayed, Tom E Rinderer, Ben P Oldroyd, Friday, Meeting Room 3, 14:15 [Nadine is woking with Dr. Oldroyd, and will be presenting on an Oldroyd/Zayed lab collaboration]

hope to c ya in Cairns!

Amro

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By Amro, June 9, 2014

Want to know why i got into science, and what i do when i am not in the lab…. Check out my interview for People Behind the Science! Also check out other interviews on this cool site!

Amro

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By Amro, May 23, 2014

If you are in Montreal next week, check out Brock Harpur’s talk on balancing selection in the bee genome, Monday 26 @ the Canadian Society of Ecology and Evolution‘s Genome To Biomes conference.

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By Amro, May 15, 2014

The lab threw me a surprise tenure party yesterday!… Here is a few pics of the celebration!

Tenure Cake

Tenured Card

BeeUnit v.2014 L to R: Maisha, Jen, Keshna, Vijay, Nadia, Amro, Brock, Alivia, Sunny, Lior, Harshil. [Missing: Daria and Phil]

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By Amro, May 8, 2014

This will sound very cheesy, but all of my life I wanted to be a tenured prof; at least since 1998 when, as an undergrad, I finally discovered what an amazing gig my university professors had; a job where you get to do what YOU want to do, ask interesting questions, do cool experiments, and interact with bright students… who wouldn’t want that?

I remember walking into Laurence Packer’s office (my entomology prof turned PhD advisor) in 1998 and telling him half-jokingly: “I want to be like you when I grow up”. Then the long journey started. A 6 year PhD (2000 to 2006), a 3 year postdoc (2006 to 2009), then I started my tenure-track position on July 1^st 2009. This however was not the end of the journey; Assistant Professors live in the Ivory tower, but they just rent it… they can be evicted from this glorious institution at any time!

And so, after five years of hard work, trials and tribulations, much less hair, a wife and 2 kids, I received THE letter today. I opened President Shoukri’s letter  with great anticipation. The text, as written, went something like “It is with pleasure that I accept the unanimous recommendations of the Adjudicating and Senate Review Committees that you be granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor, effective July 1, 2014”.

In my mind, it played a bit differently…

Voice: ‘Kneel, Assistant Professor Amro Zayed’

[i feel the weight of a heavy sceptre on my right shoulder and then on my left]

Voice: ‘Rise, Associate Professor Amro Zayed, White Knight of the Ivory Tower, Defender of the light, Keeper of bees‘