Dataset Information

Pharmacological modulation of aversive responsiveness in honey bees.

ABSTRACT: Within a honey bee colony, individuals performing different tasks exhibit different sensitivities to noxious stimuli. Noxious-stimulus sensitivity can be quantified in harnessed bees by measuring the sting extension response (SER) to a series of increasing voltages. Biogenic amines play a crucial role in the control of insect responsiveness. Whether or not these neurotransmitters affect the central control of aversive responsiveness, and more specifically of electric-shock responsiveness, remains unknown. Here we studied the involvement of the biogenic amines octopamine, dopamine and serotonin, and of the ecdysteroid 20-hydroxyecdisone in the central control of sting responsiveness to electric shocks. We injected pharmacological antagonists of these signaling pathways into the brain of harnessed bees and determined the effect of blocking these different forms of neurotransmission on shock responsiveness. We found that both octopamine and 20-hydroxyecdisone are dispensable for shock responsiveness while dopamine and serotonin act as down-regulators of sting responsiveness. As a consequence, antagonists of these two biogenic amines induce an increase in shock responsiveness to shocks of intermediate voltage; serotonin, can also increase non-specific responsiveness. We suggest that different classes of dopaminergic neurons exist in the bee brain and we define at least two categories: an instructive class mediating aversive labeling of conditioned stimuli in associative learning, and a global gain-control class which down-regulates responsiveness upon perception of noxious stimuli. Serotonergic signaling together with down-regulating dopaminergic signaling may play an essential role in attentional processes by suppressing responses to irrelevant, non-predictive stimuli, thereby allowing efficient behavioral performances.

SUBMITTER: Tedjakumala SR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3882874 | biostudies-other | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other

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Pharmacological modulation of aversive responsiveness in honey bees.

Tedjakumala Stevanus R SR Aimable Margaux M Giurfa Martin M

Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience 20140107

Within a honey bee colony, individuals performing different tasks exhibit different sensitivities to noxious stimuli. Noxious-stimulus sensitivity can be quantified in harnessed bees by measuring the sting extension response (SER) to a series of increasing voltages. Biogenic amines play a crucial role in the control of insect responsiveness. Whether or not these neurotransmitters affect the central control of aversive responsiveness, and more specifically of electric-shock responsiveness, remain ...[more]

PMID: 24431993

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Project description:Honeybees have remarkable learning abilities given their small brains, and have thus been established as a powerful model organism for the study of learning and memory. Most of our current knowledge is based on appetitive paradigms, in which a previously neutral stimulus (e.g., a visual, olfactory, or tactile stimulus) is paired with a reward. Here, we present a novel apparatus, the yAPIS, for aversive training of walking honey bees. This system consists in three arms of equal length and at 120° from each other. Within each arm, colored lights (λ = 375, 465 or 520 nm) or odors (here limonene or linalool) can be delivered to provide conditioned stimuli (CS). A metal grid placed on the floor and roof delivers the punishment in the form of mild electric shocks (unconditioned stimulus, US). Our training protocol followed a fully classical procedure, in which the bee was exposed sequentially to a CS paired with shocks (CS+) and to another CS not punished (CS-). Learning performance was measured during a second phase, which took advantage of the Y-shape of the apparatus and of real-time tracking to present the bee with a choice situation, e.g., between the CS+ and the CS-. Bees reliably chose the CS- over the CS+ after only a few training trials with either colors or odors, and retained this memory for at least a day, except for the shorter wavelength (λ = 375 nm) that produced mixed results. This behavior was largely the result of the bees avoiding the CS+, as no evidence was found for attraction to the CS-. Interestingly, trained bees initially placed in the CS+ spontaneously escaped to a CS- arm if given the opportunity, even though they could never do so during the training. Finally, honey bees trained with compound stimuli (color + odor) later avoided either components of the CS+. Thus, the yAPIS is a fast, versatile and high-throughput way to train honey bees in aversive paradigms. It also opens the door for controlled laboratory experiments investigating bimodal integration and learning, a field that remains in its infancy.

Dataset Information

Pharmacological modulation of aversive responsiveness in honey bees.

Publications

Pharmacological modulation of aversive responsiveness in honey bees.

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