Ramadan, Haitham & Li, Jianke. (2019). In-Depth Brain Phosphoproteome Study Reveals Neurobiological Underpinnings For Nurse Honeybee Workers (Apis mellifera ligustica). 33. 589 – 608.

The nurse beesperform many tasks inside the hive in the order of their roles in honeybee coloney servival. There is a lack of knowledge about how the neurobiological activities during protein phosphorylation in the brains of nurse honeybee workers align with their tasks performances. The phosphoproteome in the brains of nurse honeybee workers was characterized using Ti 4+-IMAC phosphopeptide enrichment, shotgun proteome, label-free quantitation, and bioinformatics. The identified 1,058 phosphoproteins in the nurse bee brain were involved in a wide spectrum of biological functions, metabolic pathways and kinase activities, indicating their pivotal roles to drive the brain development and maturation, the neurobiological activities, learning, and the cognition of the nurse bee brain during nursing tasks performance. The more strongly represented phosphoproteins in the nurse bee brains were intensively involved in the biological pathways of phosphatidylinositol signaling system, inositol phosphate metabolism, phototransduction, and wnt signaling. While the most enriched kinases in the nurse bee brain were CDK2_CDK3, p38, CK2, JNK, ACTR2_ACTR2B_TGFbR2, CLK, PKC, and PKA, suggesting their vital roles in the regulation of biological processes, signal transduction, and olfactory learning processes to make possible the mission of nurse bees through the brain maturation and the development of cerebral structures. Our work is the first in-depth and comprehensive phosphoproteome report on nurse honeybee worker brains and provides novel insights into the molecular details of phosphoproteins that tune protein function to the needs of nurse honeybee workers. These data provide a firm basis for future mechanistic research to better understand the neurobiological roles of targeted proteins in the nurse bee brain.