New insights into how immunity evolves could help scientists protect all the world’s flora and fauna from disease
Vilde Leipart is a researcher at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås. She shares her story on AlphaFold.
I feel strongly about the need to protect bees.
Bees are such an integral part of our culture and our economy, but more importantly, our ecosystems. The survival of many species depends on them as pollinators. But around the world, bee populations are rapidly declining due to environmental factors and human interference.
To increase their chances of survival, we need to study the fundamentals of the bees’ immune system. My interest is vitellogenin, a protein you can find in almost any egg-laying animal. It supports reproduction, but appears to play other roles as well, including immunity and regulation of feeding behavior.
Vitellogenin can bind to pathogen proteins like an antibody and contributes to immunity transmitted to egg-laying species. Fragments of bacteria, fungi and viruses, ingested by the mother – or queen – are carried to the developing eggs where they activate immunity in the developing embryo. This “transgenerational immune priming” is key to increasing the survival of bees – and many other species – in a world full of infectious diseases.
Lamprey vitellogenin was modeled in the late 1990s using X-ray crystallography. Until now, however, little was known about the structure of the bee version, which is a hard protein to map, mainly because it is so large. So we set out to use AlphaFold to figure it out.
Because vitellogenin appears to play multiple roles, we wanted to visualize the functionally specific domains, see how they interact, and then make predictions about their different functions based on the structure revealed by AlphaFold. I learned so much from the structure that AlphaFold created – I’ve spent so many hours looking at it. I’m still learning! We were able to see how the entire length of the protein is assembled and connected and how the protein subunits interact. The key is how quickly I was able to do it. It took me two days to do something that could have taken me years.
This work also has wider implications. Egg-laying species include tree frogs, chickens, crocodiles, ghost sharks and turtles. All produce vitellogenin and are all susceptible to a variety of infectious diseases. Understanding its key functions in bees may reveal what it does in other animals and, through this, help protect vulnerable wild and farmed animals from infectious diseases and pesticides.
I love studying bees and hope this research can lead to new ways to protect this species and others. I live and work in Norway. Here, fish and fishing are really important to our culture and economy. Fish – especially commercially farmed fish – are vulnerable to disease outbreaks and I want to expand my research to work on salmon vitellogenin and hopefully make a difference.
This project, made possible by AlphaFold, has implications for such a wide range of genres and scenarios, it’s truly exciting.