Posts Tagged: Haagen-Dazs Honey Bee Postdoctoral Scholar
Understanding the honey bee’s immune system is crucial to
battling the declining honey bee population, says University of
California insect virus researcher Michelle Flenniken. Speaking
to 100 fellow researchers at the Honey Bee Genomics and Biology
Conference, held recently in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
New York, Flenniken said that if a bee can develop better
antiviral immune responses, it’s better able to fight its foes.
"Our work is focused on understanding the natural mechanisms of
antiviral immunity in honey bees--or how a honey bees fights off
viral infections,” she told the researchers. “We are examining
these pathways at the molecular level using gene expression
microarrays.” Flenniken, the Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Postdoctoral
Scholar at UC Davis and a virologist in the Raul Andino lab,
Department of Microbiology and Immunology at UC San Francisco,
studies honey bee viruses and the role of RNA interference
(RNAi) in the antiviral immune r