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Dr. Olav Rueppell |
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Our office and lab space are located in the Eberhart
Building on the main
UNCG campus. Click for a broad or a detailed map how to get there. Our research apiary and bee facility are located 5min to the west (see map). If you want
to DONATE directly to UNCG’s honey bee
research program, Disclaimer:
The material located at this site is not endorsed, sponsored, or provided by or on behalf of the LAST UPDATED Sept. 2011 |
Genetic Research:
Together with our collaborators Robert Page and Gro Amdam, we are interested in the genetic architecture
of quantitative, complex traits that are important for social evolution. The
traits that are under investigation include social behavior, such as
foraging, and life history traits, such as lifespan and ovary size, an
indicator of reproductive potential. Ovary size is of particular interest
because the reproductive ground-plan hypothesis of social evolution suggests
that ancestral reproductive control modules involved in gonotropic
cycling have been co-opted by social evolution to control social behavior and
caste in social insects.
Our primary approach is quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in
experimental crosses, where trait-marker associations are studied across the
entire genome. The recent methodological developments in conjunction with
available honey bee genome
sequences make this approach now powerful and time-efficient. We are
interested in finding the number and effect size of QTL, identifying pleiotropy and epistasis, and locating the QTL to
investigate candidate genes. We use microsatellites, SNPs, and RAD-tags as
genetic markers. Due to the high recombination rate
the number of markers required to saturate a map is high but the number of positional
candidate genes obtained is lower than in most other organisms. Follow-up
studies of these candidate genes could involve sequence and expression
analysis, population association studies, and RNAi.
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