Yet Another Reason Honey Bees Are Important for Human Life

A very interesting study has been done that connects humans on the autism spectrum scale and honeybees. At the University of Illinois, Hagai Shpigler, is doing his post doctorate on a project that involved videoing honeybee’s social interactions during two different scenarios. One type of interaction recorded was putting a bee that was unfamiliar with a colony into that group and the second was introducing an immature queen larva into the unfamiliar group. In all, there were 245 groups of bees that had been brought in from seven different colonies and used to collect data on how the bees would react to the situations and then were ranked on it. The data resulted in 14% of the bees not reacting to either situation they were in while most of the bees were found to show a social reaction to atleast one of the situations. The team conducting this project analyzed the bees who reacted to neither situation and took into account their sets of genes and looked at possible similarities to genes in found in the disorders of autism, depression, and schizophrenia. Genes found in autism spectrum disorder were the only ones to have high similarity to genes found inthe bees of the 14% non social reactors. The researchers found this information to be interesting and plan to possibly find ways to better understand autism spectrum disorder on a molecular level in humans from looking at honey bees.

Can a Roommate's Genes Influence Your Health?

In this article it discusses how studies have now shown that a roommate's genes can influence and individuals health. Researchers have found that the genetics of a mouse cage mate can in fact affect its health in a number of ways. It has already been known and studied that social interaction like peer pressure contribute to health and disease. However, what researchers now are finding that ones genetic makeup can impact the traits of another. This concept has been identified as social or indirect genetic effects, but is still poorly understood. An example that the article made was a individual who is a morning person in comparison to their partner who is a night owl. The morning person could find themselves staying up later with their partner therefore inclining the morning person to stay up later resulting from an illness of lack of sleep.
I find this article interesting because I can see how interactions with others can influence behaviors which in turn can influence genes. When reading this article I thought of partners when together can influence weight gain. Myself personally have experienced and can see how this would influence my genetic make up.

The role of genetics in our social interactions and environment

Nature vs. Nurture has been constantly applied to human interactions for decades. This article provides adequate detail about just how genetics has been apart of this process. The context of this work touches on issues such as how studies of the 5-HTT mutations can affect the person's emotions, more specifically how they can regulate them. Another main concern would be how our levels of oxytocin are controlled by inheritable genes or are they? There are millions of outcomes inside the human body that result from the intermixing of our parents genes. This article takes that idea a step further to see how the outside world can too make an influence on our genotypes and phenotypes. I find it very interesting that there are so many different factors that can affect how a person acts and matures to be. 

Source:  http://fx5ly8ju5l.search.serialssolutions.com

Another useful article that can be used to further explore this side of genetics can be found : http://www.sciencedaily.com