Effect of carbendazim on honey bee health: Assessment of survival, pollen consumption, and gut microbiome composition.

Gut microbiota and nutrition play major roles in honey bee health. Recent reports have shown that pesticides can disrupt the gut microbiota and cause malnutrition in honey bees. Carbendazim is the most commonly used fungicide in China, but it is not clear whether carbendazim negatively affects the gut microbes and nutrient intake levels in honey bees. To address this research gap, we assessed the effects of carbendazim on the survival, pollen consumption, and sequenced 16 S rRNA gene to determine the bacterial composition in the midgut and hindgut. Our results suggest that carbendazim exposure does not cause acute death in honey bees even at high concentrations (5000 mg/L), which are extremely unlikely to exist under field conditions. Carbendazim does not disturb the microbiome composition in the gut of young worker bees during gut microbial colonization and adult worker bees with established gut communities in the mid and hindgut. However, carbendazim exposure significantly decreases pollen consumption in honey bees. Thus, exposure of bees to carbendazim can perturb their beneficial nutrition homeostasis, potentially reducing honey bee immunity and increasing their susceptibility to infection by pathogens, which influence effectiveness as pollinators, even colony health.

Transcriptome Analysis of Newly Emerged Honeybees Exposure to Sublethal Carbendazim During Larval Stage.

There are increasing concerns regarding the impact of agrochemical pesticides on non-target organisms. Pesticides could cause honeybee abnormal development in response to neurotoxins such as neonicotinoid. However, knowledge of carbendazim, a widespread fungicide in beekeeping practice, influencing on honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) brain development is lacking. Large-scale transcriptome approaches were applied to determine the changes in global gene expression in the brains of newly emerged honeybees after carbendazim exposure during the larval stage. To further understand the effects of carbendazim on the brain development of honeybees, the functions of differentially expressed genes were compared between the treatment and control groups. We found that neuroregulatory genes were down-regulated after carbendazim exposure, which suggest the neurotoxic effects of this fungicide on honeybee nervous system. Carbendazim exposure also altered the expression of genes implicated in metabolism, transport, sensor, and hormone. Notably, larvae in the carbendazim-treated group observed longer time to shift into the dormant pupal state than the control group. Moreover, a low juvenile hormone and high ecdysone titers were found in the treatment group compared to control group. The data is the first report of neurotoxic effects on honeybee caused by carbendazim, and the sublethal carbendazim may disturb honeybee development and is a potential chemical threating the honeybee colonies.

Investigation of the nonspecific interaction between quantum dots and immunoglobulin G using Rayleigh light scattering.

Quantum dots (QDs) have been used as a new class of bioprobes in medical imaging in recent years. The study of interaction between QDs and biomacromolecules is important for interpreting biological data. In this work, Rayleigh light scattering (RLS) was employed to investigate the nonspecific interaction between mercaptoacetic acid modified CdSe/ZnS quantum dots (MAA-QDs) and human immunoglobulin G (IgG). The conjugation processes between QDs and IgG in different conditions including addition sequence, pH were carefully studied. The addition of IgG to QDs solution was found to form a fixed size of QDs-IgG conjugate, with the QDs-to-IgG ratio of approximately 13, while the addition of QDs to IgG solution resulted in a gradually increased conjugate size, with variable QDs-to-IgG ratio till the binding saturation was reached.

Spectrofluorimetric determination of trace nitrite in food products with a new fluorescent probe 1,3,5,7-tetramethyl-2,6-dicarbethoxy-8-(3',4'-diaminophenyl)-difluoroboradiaza-s-indacene.

A new fluorescent probe 1,3,5,7-tetramethyl-2,6-dicarbethoxy-8-(3',4'-diaminophenyl)-difluoroboradiaza-s-indacene (TMDCDABODIPY) has been developed to detect nitrite in meat products and vegetables. The fluorescence of TMDCDABODIPY is very weak, but when it reacts with nitrite, a strong fluorescent triazole forms in aqueous medium at room temperature, which offers the advantage of specificity and sensitivity for the determination of nitrite. The fluorescence intensity was linear over a nitrite concentration of 9-300 nmol l(-1) with a detection limit of 0.21 nmol l(-1) (S/N=3). The proposed method has been used for the determination of trace nitrite in food products with the recoveries of 94.62-105.48%.