Recent insights into the evolution of immunity could facilitate scientists protect 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 of AlphaFold.
I deeply believe in the need to protect honeybees.
Honeybees are an integral part of our culture and economy, but most importantly, our ecosystems. Many species depend on them as pollinators for their survival. However, honeybee populations are rapidly dwindling worldwide due to environmental factors and human interference.
To augment their chances of survival, we need to study the basics of the bees’ immune system. My area of interest is vitellogenin, a protein found in almost every egg-laying animal. It aids reproduction but also appears to play other roles, including immunity and regulation of feeding behavior.
Vitelogenin can bind to pathogen proteins like an antibody and contributes to immunity passed on to egg-laying species. Fragments of bacteria, fungi and viruses, ingested by the mother – or queen – are transferred to the developing eggs, where they trigger immunity in the developing embryo. This “transgenerational immune priming” is crucial to increasing the survival of honeybees – and many other species – in a world rife with infectious diseases.
Lamprey vitellogenin was modeled in the delayed 1990s using X-ray crystallography. Until now, however, little was known about the structure of the honeybee version, which is a tough protein to map, largely because it is so enormous. So we decided to operate AlphaFold to understand it.
Because vitellogenin seems to play multiple roles, we wanted to visualize its function-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 spent so many hours staring 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 subunits of the protein interact. The key is how quickly I was able to do it. It took me two days to do something that would have taken me years.
The work also has broader implications. Egg-laying species include tree frogs, chickens, crocodiles, ghost sharks, and turtles. All produce vitellogenin, and all are susceptible to a variety of infectious diseases. Understanding its basic functions in honeybees could reveal what it does in other animals, and thus facilitate protect vulnerable wildlife and livestock from infectious diseases and pesticides.
I love studying honeybees and hope that this research will lead to recent ways to protect this species and others. I live and work in Norway. Here, fish and fishing are really vital to our culture and economy. Fish – especially commercially farmed fish – are prone to disease outbreaks and I want to expand my research to work on salmon vitellogenin and hopefully make a difference.
This work, made possible by the AlphaFold project, has implications for such a wide range of genres and scenarios that it is truly thrilling.