Fig. 1: Live gut bacteria prime systemic humoral and cellular immunity in honey bees. | Nature Communications

Fig. 1: Live gut bacteria prime systemic humoral and cellular immunity in honey bees.

From: Gut microbiota-derived butyrate primes systemic immunity in honey bees by mediating lipid metabolic reprogramming

Fig. 1: Live gut bacteria prime systemic humoral and cellular immunity in honey bees.

a Experimental design for (b–e). Newly emerged worker bees were divided into GF (germ-free), HK (inoculated with heat-killed gut homogenate), and CV (inoculated with nurse bee gut homogenate) groups. Gut bacterial inoculation was conducted within one day after emergence. Bees were maintained for 5 days prior to Hafnia injection, and separate groups of bees were used for the survival assay, gene expression analysis, and confocal microscopy. Created in BioRender. Liu, L. (2025) https://BioRender.com/en83bag. b Survival rates for GF, HK, and CV bees post Hafnia injection. Bars represent mean ± s.d. from three biological replicates (20 individuals in each replicate). The results are from one of two independent experiments (Supplementary Fig. 1b for replicate data). A two-sided Mantel-Cox test was used. Different letters above bars indicate statistically significant differences among treatments (P < 0.05). c Antimicrobial peptide (AMP) gene expression in fat bodies of GF, HK, and CV bees, measured by qPCR (SYBR Green, Actin-normalized). Bars represent mean ± s.e.m. n = 6 individuals for each group from 3 cup cages. d Ventral view of bee abdominal tergum showing the dorsal vessel. Yellow arrows indicate the ostia. e Hemocyte aggregation post-GFP-Hafnia injection (green). Hemocytes were stained with CM-DiI (red), and dorsal vessels were outlined by white dashed lines. Scale bars: 250 μm. Representative images from one of two independent experiments (Supplementary Fig. S2–3 for replicate data). f Quantitative analysis of CM-DiI staining in hemocytes (see Fig. 1e and Supplementary Fig. 2). Bars represent mean ± s.e.m. n = 5 individuals per group from 3 cup cages. (c, f) Two-way ANOVA with Tukey’s multiple comparisons test. Different letters above bars indicate statistically significant differences among treatments (P < 0.05). ns: not significant. All P values are listed in Supplementary Dataset 5. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.

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