Stay embryonic
Bee Protein Keeps Stem Cells stem
Kirill Stasevich, "Science and Life"
We know that bees have different castes: there are individuals who collect nectar and pollen, there are those who take care of the larvae, etc. All worker bees are females, except for them there are also male drones. But all of them, both working females and drones, differ from the queen queen, who is noticeably larger than her subjects.
But if the uterus is larger, it means that stem cells have been working in her body for longer, which produce all types of specialized cells: heart, muscle, nerve, etc. Any organism begins with embryonic stem cells that divide, divide and divide, simultaneously acquiring specialization. In the queen bee, stem cells divide longer than in worker bees, which is why it turns out to be larger.
But after all, worker bees and queens have the same genes. This means that they work differently for them – that is, the genes that support b cells in the stem state work longer in the uterus. Obviously, it's all about nutrition. As we again know, those larvae that are to become queens of hives are fed by nurse bees only with royal jelly, and the queen herself eats the same milk all her life. (The larvae, which are intended for workers, also initially eat milk, but quite quickly begin to mix nectar and pollen there.)
Royal jelly contains a protein called royalactin, to which the milk is believed to owe much of its properties: royalactin controls the activity of genes, helping the larva to become a queen. Researchers from Stanford decided to test how bee protein will act on embryonic stem cells of mice (Honeybee protein keeps stem cells youthful). These cells, if they are grown in the laboratory, have to be restricted all the time so that they do not begin to specialize, for which special regulatory proteins are added to their nutrient medium, which inhibit specialization and delay stem cells in the stem state.
An article in Nature Communications says that if bee protein was added to the cells, then the cells remained stem cells without any additional tricks. Royalactin stimulated the activity of genes that kept cells in an "omnipotent" undifferentiated state – they continued to divide, preserving the ability to turn into anything, into any type of cell.
Vertebrates do not have royalactin, but there is a similar protein NHLRC3, which is active during embryonic development. In experiments, it acted on mouse embryonic cells in the same way as royalactin. (Curiously, NHLRC3 (which was renamed the Regina protein, that is, the "queen" protein) does not look like bee protein in amino acid sequence – but it is similar in shape, in three-dimensional structure.)
A lot depends on stem cells; many diseases, especially those that come with age, could be avoided if we were able to manage our stem cells – for example, last year we wrote that the aging of the whole organism can be delayed if the hypothalamus stem cells are updated.
Whether royalactin and NHLRC3 have any medical prospects, whether they can, for example, accelerate wound healing, further experiments will show. The secret of stem cells, of course, is not limited to just one protein, but the more we know about them, the more perfect our cell-stem medicine will be.
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