Epigenetic integration of genomic and environmental information in honey bees

It is believed that epigenetic processes such as DNA methylation provide a link between the genome and environment and have the capacity to enforce differential expression of a common program. Our aim is to gain compelling insights into the epigenomic mechanisms that have been selected by nature to control behavioural networks, such as the sociality in insects. We will investigate how some types of stimuli are able to affect the genome by altering gene expression and how these changes are integrated to create differential phenotypic and behavioural outputs. We will develop an integrated epigenomic picture of the genome/environment interactions