News archive

News regarding the School is displayed below in reverse chronological order. For current job vacancies and research studentships see the Vacancies section of the site. For details of forthcoming seminars see the links in the navigation menus.

May 2009 - SBCS Infectious Diseases consultant advises media

Dr Ron Cutler, a SBCS biomedical scientist specialising in Infectious Diseases and their control and treatment, has been advising the news media on the latest “swine flu” outbreak. One of his current research programmes, supported by industry and the EPSRC, is particularly relevant to these outbreaks as it is aimed at improving the methods used to reduce the transmission of infection from hands. Dr Cutler is the Deputy Director of the Biomedical Sciences Progamme in SBCS.

For more information on the "swine flu" discussion, see these reports from The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, and BBC News.

April 2009 - Student project characterising choroplast sensor kinase

The photo shows Iskander Ibrahim in the laboratory on April 8 2009 where he is continuing his research as a PhD project. The paper is available on Advanced Open Access from April 19: Ibrahim, 10.1093/biohorizons/hzp022 -- Bioscience Horizons.

March 2009 - Ecological Engineering: Could beavers be reintroduced to England?

Beavers could be successfully reintroduced to many parts of England, boosting wildlife and helping to reduce the risk of flooding, according to a report led by a Queen Mary scientist.

The results of a unique study into the desirability and feasibility of reintroducing the European beaver to the English countryside are published today (Wednesday 18 March) by Natural England and the People's Trust for Endangered Species. The jointly commissioned report considers the impacts that a beaver reintroduction might have and the conditions under which a reintroduction could be made.

Lead author Professor John Gurnell from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences believes that beavers could act as ‘ecosystem engineers' providing many benefits to the English countryside. “The potential for them to give benefits to the country at large is quite enormous,” he explains. By building dams, for example, they can boost water quality, increase the level of the local water table, alleviate the effects of flooding and raise river levels during drought.

Beavers were once a common feature in the British countryside but were driven to extinction in England 400 years ago. Recently there has been considerable interest in the potential for their reintroduction, recognising the contribution that beavers make to river and wetland management and to restoring lost biodiversity.

Professor Gurnell added that some people feared beavers would cause damage to crops, trees or fishponds, spread disease, damage angling or affect wildlife. But he said "most negative effects are probably more minor than major", and would be reasonably straightforward to manage with forethought. The benefits that the species would bring would more than outweigh any disadvantages.

A planned reintroduction of beavers is set to take place in Scotland later this year and a feasibility study is currently being carried out in Wales.

Commenting on the report, Tom Tew, Natural England's Chief Scientist, added: “Natural England has not made decisions yet about whether reintroductions should take place. Beavers could have a range of environmental benefits but could only be reintroduced under the right conditions. The challenge in considering any future licence application is to ensure that these conditions can be met”.

BBC News; Telegraph; Times; Guardian

February 2009 - The Hazards of Biofuels

Technologies that often appear low-key in the laboratories are sometimes counter-productive and detrimental upon widespread implementation. Biofuels are a classic example of this, warn scientists including Matt Struebig of the School of Biological and Chemical Sciences. Their rise has accelerated global warming through increased deforestation in the tropics as the price of biofuels has gone up. Their production is also inefficient as it burns more energy than is produced and some studies show they release heavier levels of carbon dioxide than the fossil fuels they are supposed to be replacing. Read the article in the Global Politician.

February 2009 - Deadly wildlife virus: the fight is on

There is an unwelcome visitor in our back gardens. The owners of suburban garden ponds have been opening their curtains to find dead frogs all over the lawn. This threat to our well-loved native frogs is caused by a foreign virus (Ranavirus) which has invaded the home counties around London, and is now spreading North and West.

Dr Amber Teacher conducted an experiment to see if the frogs were fighting back, in a project combining the expertise of fellow scientists at Queen Mary University of London and the Institute of Zoology. In ponds where the frogs have suffered repeated infection, she found consistent changes to a gene (MHC) coding for a major part of the frog's immune system. These genetic variants were rarer in ponds that have so far escaped the disease.

It seems, as Darwin would have predicted, that the plucky surviving frogs have passed on to their descendants an immune systems better tuned to the new threat. However, it is too early to determine if this response will be enough to save the populations. In doing this work Dr Teacher has discovered that the frog's immune system is simpler than many animals', including humans, who have several MHC genes apparently doing a similar job. This discovery has helped identify the point in our evolutionary history when this multiplication of genes occurred. With luck, the frog's simpler system will be sufficient to win their battle.

Teacher A, Garner T, Nichols R (2009) “Evidence for Directional Selection at a Novel Major Histocompatibility Class I Marker in Wild Common Frogs (Rana temporaria) Exposed to a Viral Pathogen” is published in PLoS ONE.

February 2009 - Discovering the secret code behind photosynthesis'

John Allen and Sujith Puthiyaveetil from the SBCS have found that primitive bacteria communications may explain how plants and algae control photosynthesis. The communication process in bacteria is called two-component signal transduction systems, which determines the response depending on a change in environment. This new research shows that plants and algae use this system also when sending signals within their cells. John Allen said: “The discovery is exciting evidence for an unorthodox theory of cell evolution first published sixteen years ago in the Journal of Theoretical Biology". Find out more...

February 2009 - Cannabis: The Evil Weed?

Addiction specialist Dr John Marsden discovers that modern science is finally beginning to find answers to the questions that cannabis poses. John traces the cannabis plants birthplace in Kazakhstan and finds the origins of sensitivity to cannabis in the simple sea-squirt – this includes research conducted by Professor Maurice Elphick's team at SBCS. Watch BBC2 Horzion programme on iplayer.

February 2009 - How your body clock avoids hitting the snooze button

Professor Ralf Stanewsky and his team from the SBCS are studying the circadian clocks of Drosophila, a type of fruit fly. Writing in the journal Current Biology, they report that the resetting process is governed by three factors, called Cryptochrome, Jetlag and Timeless. The team's findings suggest that the light responses of circadian clocks are fine tuned on a molecular level, by small differences in the clock proteins.

February 2009 - The snake that was so big it ate crocodiles

Scientists have recovered fossils of a 60-million-year-old South American snake, named Titanoboa cerrejonensis, that weighed in at 1140 kg and measured 13 metres nose to tail tip. Whilest working in the SBCS, Drs Jason Head and David Polly identified the position of the fossil vertebrae which made a size estimate possible. Now based at the University of Indiana, Davis Polly explains: At its greatest width, the snake would have come up to about your hips. The size is pretty amazing. Read more...

January 2009 - Disease clues passed from mother to offspring

A team of scientists from several universities including Dr. Alan McElligott from the SBCS, have found that, during pregnancy when there is a threat of disease, mothers produce less aggressive sons with tougher immune systems. The study was conducted in a series of tests using pregnant mice but the researchers believe this ability will occur in other species. See more details in the articles in Science Daily, and Red Orbit.

January 2009 - SBCS student wins HSBC Student Bursary Award

Congratulations to Medical Genetics student Chandni Patel who was one of the winners following a competition to identify high-potential individuals from over 3,000 entries by a panel including NUS representatives, former tennis pro Tim Henman and leading academics. Patel said: It is my dream to be a doctor (neurosurgeon), so I would like to gain graduate entry into medicine and make the most of my skills by diagnosing and treating patients who are ill. I hope to assist all the researchers who are working hard to find cures for life-taking diseases.

December 2008 - Oil palm biofuels: double jeopardy for biodiversity and climate

Keeping tropical rain forests intact is a better way to combat climate change than replacing them with biofuel plantations, according to a new in-depth study by an international team of scientists, including Matt Struebig from the SBCS. Published in the journal Conservation Biology, the study reveals that it would take at least 75 years for the carbon emissions saved through the use of biofuels to compensate for the carbon lost through forest conversion. And if the original habitat was carbon-rich peatland, the carbon balance would take more than 600 years. On the other hand, planting biofuels on degraded Imperata grasslands instead of tropical rain forests would lead to a net removal of carbon in 10 years, the authors found.

The study is the most comprehensive analysis of the impact of oil palm plantations in tropical forests on climate and biodiversity. It was undertaken by an international research team of botanists, ecologists and engineers from seven nations. Matt Struebig, from Queen Mary's School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, explained: For fauna, only one in six forest species can survive in plantations. Plantations are frequently dominated by a few abundant species that are widespread and of low conservation concern. See BBC News item; the paper is published in Conservation Biology.

October 2008 - Buzz off, we're taking it easy, bees tell scientists

Research shows some insects belie their reputation and won't go foraging for food until supplies run out. Dr Nigel Raine and Dr Mathieu Molet from the SBCS have discovered that some bumblebees have a tendency to ignore promptings to go out to get food, choosing to rest instead if there is even a tiny amount of food in their store. It appears that the insects use a sophisticated system to decide whether they need to go out to work or whether they can afford to take it easy. See the article in the Independent...

October 2008 - Biofuels policy will be a tricky compromise

SBCS' Emeritus Professor Utley comments on Oxfam’s biofuels campaign. He said: It is foolish, perhaps worse, to divert land use from food production, but the internal combustion engine is with us for some years yet and thus there is a need for volatile fuels, eg, ethanol, derived from renewable resources. Read more ...

October 2008 - Commercial sense and sensor abilities

A new spin out company called DegraSense Ltd has been created at Queen Mary to commercialise novel protease bisensor technology developed from the research of Dr Mike Watkinson from the SBCS and Dr Steffi Kraus from the School of Engineering and Materials Science. The company aims to develop a point of care, dental diagnostic that could improve the treatment of periodontal disease and other inflammatory conditions.

October 2008 - Bee smart, bee healthy

Dr Nigel Raine from Queen Mary’s School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, and Akram Alghamdi, Ezio Rosato and Eamonn Mallon from the University of Leicester tested the learning performance and immune responses of bumblebees from twelve colonies. The team tested the ability of 180 bees to learn that yellow flowers provided the biggest nectar rewards, and to ignore blue flowers. To test the evolutionary relationship between learning and immunity, they also took workers from the same colonies and tested their immune response against bacterial infection. Like humans, bees’ ability to learn appears reduced when they are ill. The prediction was that good learners would be worse at fighting infections but surprisingly, this was not the case. Writing in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the team reports a positive relationship between a bumblebee colony’s learning performance and their immune response, as Dr Raine explains: “Bees from fast learning colonies are not only the best nectar collectors, but also better able to fight infections. These colonies are probably much better equipped to thrive under difficult conditions.”

More of this story in Physorg and Science Blog

October 2008 - A ray of hope for one of the UK's most iconic and endangered animals?

Scientists including Professor John Gurnell have discovered some red squirrels are immune to squirrelpox viral disease, which could be the main factor leading to the extinction of these animals - the results of their study are published in EcoHealth. See here for more information...

October 2008 - Bumblebees learn the sweet smell of foraging success

Mathieu Molet, Lars Chittka and Nigel Raine from the SBCS have discovered that bumblebees direct their nest mates to food by using flower scents. Bees are ‘social’ animals and often hunt for food in groups by recruiting fellow nest mates. In the study, the scent of the most rewarding flowers was brought back to the nest as a guide to other bees, so they would know where to hunt. Dr Raine said: “Successful bees motivate their sisters to find food by running excitedly around the nest, buzzing and releasing pheromone. They bring home the scent of the flowers they visited which fills the air and flavours the honey. The other bees leave the nest and search for nectar-rich flowers with the same smell.”

Read more about this story that featured widely in the media including Nature (Research News -Vol 456|13 November 2008 page 144), Metro, Daily India, Eurek Alert, e Science News, Science Daily, Pysorg and Genetic Engineering News.

October 2008 - Female fallow deer prefer male deer with a low, deep groan

Research published in the journal PLoS One by Queen Mary's new recruit, Dr Alan McElligott, and Dr Elisabetta Vannoni of the University of Zurich has shown that female fallow deer are attracted to a deep call as reported in the Daily Telegraph and the National Geographic

October 2008 - Bumblebees outwit robotic spiders

A new paper in Current Biology by Thomas Ings and Lars Chittka shows that bumblebees are able to learn to outwit predatory colour changing crab spiders. Using their artificial meadow containing robotic spiders, Ings and Chittka discovered that bees encountering camouflaged spiders make a functional decision to trade off reduced foraging efficiency against accurate predator detection and avoidance. Read more and watch a video on the BBC Nature News site.

September 2008 - Beginning to see the light

The retina of a vertebrate's eye contains rod and cone cells which are required for vision. In the so called disk membranes, located in the outer segments of the rod cells, the protein rhodopsin is highly enriched which senses visual light by means of retinal, a bound organic molecule. Once this protein gets activated by a photon, it binds transducin, a so-called G-protein, thereby triggering a cascade of processes which finally lead to the physiological response underlying vision.

A group of researchers from the Charité in Germany, Chonbuk National University in South Korea, joined by Norbert Krauss from Queen Mary, have now determined the three-dimensional structure of opsin, a retinal-free form of rhodopsin, in a state where it interacts with the G-protein. Structure analysis of this state was made possible by growing crystals which contain complexes of opsin with a short peptide which was derived from a subunit of the G-protein. The structure of this complex, in which the opsin is locked in its active form due the interaction with the peptide, was determined by X-ray crystallography. By comparing this structure with the known structures of rhodopsin in its inactive form, it can be explained how the membrane-intrinsic region of rhodopsin changes its three-dimensional structure upon activation by light, thereby opening a binding site for the G-protein.

This work, which was published in Nature on September 25th by P. Scheerer, Jung Hee Park and co-workers, not only contributes to our understanding of the primary processes underlying vision. As rhodopsin is a representative of the large class of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), which are signal transducing receptors integrated in the cell membranes of eukaryotes that modulate a wide range of physiological processes and are predicted to be structurally similar to rhodopsin, first-time knowledge of the structures of a GPCR in its active and inactive states will also aid the selective design of drugs which act by blocking or stimulating GPCR activity.

September 2008 - Professor Lars Chittka on The One Show

Phil Tufnell interviewed Professor Chittka on 26th September on BBC's The One Show about his study of bumble bees and how they prefer Van Gough's Sunflowers to other pieces of art.

September 2008 - How will oil palm expansion affect biodiversity?

Matthew Struebig, working in Stephen Rossiter’s research group, has co-led a review of the impacts of oil palm plantations on biodiversity. The paper, co-authored with colleagues from the UK, Germany and Denmark, is published in the October issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution.

Palm oil, used in food, biofuels and other products, is the world’s leading vegetable oil. It is produced from the oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), a plant native to Africa, but now grown across more than 135,000 km2 of tropical countries, with 80% produced in Malaysia and Indonesia.

The paper was written to tackle a fierce debate that has erupted over the role of palm oil production in tropical deforestation and its impacts on biodiversity. It includes an objective assessment of the role of oil palm in deforestation, the secondary effects of plantation development, and the value of oil palm habitat compared to forests and other plantation crops. The grim conclusion is that continued expansion of the crop will worsen both climate change and biodiversity loss, unless rainforests are better protected. Of crucial importance are emerging opportunities for the industry to reduce its environmental impact. The paper should help the Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil to strengthen industry commitments to saving wildlife on and around plantations in Southeast Asia, Africa and Central America.

September 2008 - The buzz of the chase

The BBC and New Scientist magazine recently reported on work by Nigel Raine and Steve Le Comber applying geographic profiling techniques normally used on serial killers to the analysis of the foraging patterns of bees. The success of the technique suggests it could also be useful to study foraging behaviour in other animal species, to help locate the nests of rare bees for conservation, and possibly even feed back into improving models used in criminology.

September 2008 - Molecular evolution is echoed in bat ears

Drs. Steve Rossiter and James Cotton with colleagues from Bristol and Shanghai looked at the Prestin gene, which codes for a protein of the outer hair cells – the tiny structures in the inner ear that help to give mammals their sensitive hearing. The team found that the gene had evolved to become similar in unrelated lineages of echolocating bats, the ears of which are tuned to higher sound frequencies than those of any other mammals because they need to listen to the returning echoes of their ultra-sonic calls.

This apparent independent evolution of a trait in distant relatives is known as convergence, a term that is more commonly used to describe the physical features of species that live in similar habitats and face similar selection pressures, such as the spines of hedgehogs and porcupines. Examples of convergence at a molecular level are very rare.

September 2008 - Biodiversity and ecosystem processes

A global consortium, co-chaired by SBCS’s Professor David Bignell, shows that terrestrial organic decomposition can proceed faster if soil animals have high diversity.

Does biodiversity matter? Despite our intuitive feeling that it must, robust data showing a link between assemblage size (the number of species or other taxonomic groups represented) and the rate of ecosystem processes are scarce. A new experimental study of soil animals, conducted simultaneously at 30 sites on 6 continents throughout the world, shows that ordinal richness and the rate of breakdown of a candidate organic substrate (dry grass) are correlated. In this work, published in the September issue of Global Change Biology, grass was harvested in Colorado and distributed to sites ranging from Tasmania to the northern coast of Canada, representing the major biomes between and covering 111 degrees of latitude. The grass was allowed to decompose naturally, but the loss of carbon and the diversity of animals (mostly mesofauna) colonising it were monitored periodically. The experiment included a treatment in which the animals were suppressed by naphthalene: this enabled the effects of climate (temperature and precipitation, both of which vary predictably with latitude) to be separated from those of taxonomic diversity. Ordinal richness was found to account for 20% of the variance of the overall dataset, with higher rates of C loss being positively correlated with higher animal diversity; however the effect was only seen in (broadly) temperate biomes and the humid tropics (red on the map). In deserts and at high latitude, the lack of water or the low temperature constrains biological activity too much for soil animal diversity to influence decomposition directly. The study took 8 years to plan, execute, analyse and publish, and was a product of the 2001 DIVERSITAS International Biodiversity Observation Year. The full text can be found here.

August 2008 - SBCS students back from Borneo

SBCS students and staff are back from a very successful trip to Borneo, where they undertook a new two-week field course on Tropical Ecology and Conservation.

Find out more about the field course here...

July 2008 - The Making of Me: John Barrowman

The Making of Me is a new science series for the BBC in which famous people ask: why are we the way we are? In the first episode, Torchwood star John Barrowman challenges scientists to explain why he's gay. He meets Queen Mary's Dr Qazi Rahman, a leading scientist on human sexual orientation who leads John through a series of psychological tests to explore the origin of his sexuality.

The Making of Me was shown on BBC One on 24th July at 9.00pm - see on BBC iPlayer or see a video clip here...

July 2008 - Disappearing bees

Dr Nigel Raine discussed declines in bee populations on the Radio 4 science programme, Material World (3rd July).

Listen to the programme online here....

Dr Nigel Raine also helped persuade a group of nature novices about the importance of bees and their pollination services as part of the series, Not in My Nature. (30th June).

Find out more about the series here...

July 2008 - James Sullivan on BBC ONE

Dr James Sullivan talked about penicillin on the BBC's The One Show on Monday 7th July. It is 80 years since the drug was discovered by Alexander Fleming.

See a video clip of the show here...

July 2008 - Evolution. The ancestral symbiont sensor kinase CSK links photosynthesis with gene expression in chloroplasts

In our Queen Mary laboratory, Sujith Puthiyaveetil has now found, in plants, the conserved, ancestral, sensor kinase that couples photosynthesis to chloroplast gene transcription, and whose existence and properties are predicted by John Allen's CORR hypothesis for the evolution of eukaryotic cells. Numerous experimental predictions flow from this key discovery.

The Chloroplast Sensor Kinase. The pictures above show a pair of guard cells forming one stoma of a tobacco leaf and viewed by fluorescence microscopy. In the left image, Individual chloroplasts in the cells are seen as fluorescence from green fluorescent protein, GFP, that has been imported into the chloroplasts as a passenger with the Chloroplast Sensor Kinase, CSK. The middle image shows the same view, but the image is of red chlorophyll fluorescence. The right image shows an overlay of the other two images. The red and green fluorescence together give the colour orange. Only one of the two guard cells happened to receive a tungsten particle, coated with the GFP-CSK gene. The gene was expressed and the protein imported into the chloroplasts of that cell. Natural selection has retained a bacterial sensor kinase in chloroplasts, but moved its gene to the cell nucleus to make a precursor targeted to chloroplasts.

See - Puthiyaveetil S, Kavanagh TA, Cain P, Sullivan JA, Newell CA, Gray JC, Robinson C, van der Giezen M, Rogers MB, Allen JF (2008) The ancestral symbiont sensor kinase CSK links photosynthesis with gene expression in chloroplasts. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: July 22, 2008 vol. 105 no. 29 10061–10066. Full Text (PDF).

July 2008 - SBCS students back from Borneo

A group of 18 students and four members of staff have just returned from the rainforests of Borneo, where they undertook a two-week field course on Tropical Ecology and Conservation. This module, which was offered for the first time this year, provides a unique hands-on experience of aquatic and terrestrial tropical ecology. As well as learning about the main features and processes of tropical forests, the students were taught how to sample and handle a range of taxonomic groups, from fishes and frogs to bats and beetles. The module was run with the Museums Department and University of Brunei. The picture show students examining the forest profile from above the canopy.

More information on this module can be found here.

June 2008 - Homosexual behaviour due to genetics and environmental factors

Dr Qazi Rahman, who recently featured in the media commenting on studies of brain differences in heterosexual and homosexual individuals, has published new work showing that sexual orientation is determined by a combination of genetics and environmental factors.

June 2008 - What does gay look like? - Science keeps trying to find out

Dr Qazi Rahman provides research insights into possible biological determinants of sexual orientation in the Los Angeles Times. Dr Rahman focuses in particular on the higher incidence of left-handedness in gay populations as compared to heterosexual groups. Read the article in the Los Angeles Times.

June 2008 - Linnean Medal for Botany 2008

Professor Jeff Duckett has been awarded the prestigious Linnean Medal for Botany for his research on the biology and evolution of lower land plants.

May 2008 - Secrets of the world's first multicellular organisms

Anabaena is a filamentous cyanobacterium which is a true multicellular bacterium - it has different cell types which co-operate in order to survive. Cyanobacteria like Anabaena may have been the first multicellular organisms on earth. What Conrad Mullineaux and his colleagues show in a recent EMBO Journal" paper is how cells in an Anabaena filament exchange molecules via protein structures that seem to form tiny channels linking the cells together

They used fluorescence microscopy to observe a fluorescent tracer molecule flowing from cell to cell through these channels. The evolution of these channel structures must have been crucial for the development of multicellularity in Anabaena.

The experiments reported in the paper are the result of a collaboration between groups in QMUL, Seville and Leeds. However, the first experiments were carried out by Hajara Khanum, an undergraduate student doing her final-year research project in the Mullineaux lab at QMUL. Hajara is an author on the paper, in recognition of her contribution. The work continues a research theme established by a distinguished former member of the School, Prof G.E. Fogg FRS (1919-2005), after whom one of the School's buildings is named. One of Fogg's many achievements was to show that multicellularity in Anabaena allows it to simultaneously perform two of the most important biochemical processes on the planet - oxygenic photosynthesis and nitrogen fixation.

*Conrad W Mullineaux, Vicente Mariscal, Anja Nenninger, Hajara Khanum, Antonia Herrero, Enrique Flores, David G Adams (2008) Mechanism of intercellular molecular exchange in heterocyst-forming cyanobacteria. The EMBO Journal 27: 1299-1308.

April 2008 - Methane-derived carbon fuels lake food webs around the globe

Following on from the revelation of SBCS's Dr Mark Trimmer that English chalk streams and ocean microbes could be contributing to global warming (December 2007), Dr Jonathan Grey and colleagues have revealed the widespread use of methane-derived carbon as an energy source at the base of lake food webs.

Using a stable isotope approach, Dr Grey identified chironomid (midge) larvae as likely consumers of methane-oxidising bacteria, those bacteria which can successfully use methane as an energy source and make that carbon available as biomass to higher organisms. “We gathered data from 87 lakes to determine how widespread this phenomenon might be and to define the boundaries for its likely magnitude”. This involved sampling a wide variety of lake types with colleagues from as far flung as New Zealand and Arctic Sweden.

The study, recently published in Ecology, suggests that up to 70% of larval biomass in many productive lakes may have been ‘fuelled’ by a greenhouse gas. “Our study demonstrates that methane-derived carbon is an important, but often neglected, contribution to the flux of carbon through the food webs of many lakes”. Since chironomid larvae eventually emerge en masse as winged adults and have a brief mating flight period, many terrestrial predators such as swallows target them when provisioning for their own young. Thus, methane generated within aquatic sediments may actually be transferred in this manner across ecosystem boundaries and subsidise terrestrial food webs

January 2008 - Bumblebees gain fitness through learning

The speed with which bees learn affects their ability to collect food from flowers, with faster learning bees reaping greater nectar rewards, according to research conducted by SBCS’s Dr Nigel Raine and Professor Lars Chittka. As nectar levels in flowers change from minute-to-minute, faster learning bees are more likely to keep track of which blooms are most rewarding, and thrive as a result.

Dr Raine and Professor Chittka presented twelve bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) colonies with flight arenas containing blue and yellow artificial flowers, which were stocked with different amounts of nectar reward. The bees were challenged to overcome their natural preference for 'blue' flowers, and to learn that the 'yellow' flowers were more rewarding. The team found that the colonies which learned colours quickly, were more successful foragers.

Dr Raine explains: "It is often assumed that the learning abilities of animals are adapted to the environments in which they live and that faster learning animals should be at an advantage. Our study is the first to go out and test this assumption looking at an animal in the wild. We indeed find that faster learning bees appear to have an advantage when looking for food."

Foraging bees use a variety of cues, including floral colour, pattern and scent, to recognize, discriminate and learn the flowers from which they collect food. As bees naturally forage in an environment in which the most rewarding flower type often changes, it seems likely that bees which learn quickly have the flexibility to keep track of the most rewarding flowers.

The team's findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that differences in learning performance have important evolutionary consequences for animal foraging and fitness under natural conditions.

"Rather like us, some bees learn from their mistakes more quickly than others. These faster learning bees also collect more nectar from flowers, which ultimately means their colony will be more successful," explains Dr Raine.

January 2008 - Gender differences in spatial navigation

Gay men navigate in a similar way to women, according to a new study led by SBCS's Dr Qazi Rahman, published this month in the journal Hippocampus.

Dr Rahman used virtual reality scenarios to investigate if spatial learning and memory in humans can be linked to sexual orientation.

Differences in spatial learning and memory (our ability to record and recall information about our environment) are common between men and women. It has been shown that men consistently outperform women on tasks requiring navigation and discovering hidden objects; whereas women are more successful at tests which require them to remember where those objects lie in a particular space.

This is the first study to investigate if those differences are also true for gay, lesbian and straight individuals.

Dr Rahman used virtual reality stimulations of two common tests of spatial learning and memory, designed by researchers at Yale University. In the Morris Water Maze test (MWM), participants found themselves in a virtual pool and had to escape as quickly as possible using spatial clues in the virtual room to find a hidden platform. In the Radial Arm Maze test (RAM), participants had to traverse eight ‘arms’ from a circular junction to find hidden rewards. Four of the arms contained a reward, four did not.

Dr Rahman and his research assistant, Johanna Koerting, found that during the MWM test gay men and straight women took longer to find the hidden platform than did straight men. However, both gay and straight men spent more of their “dwelling time” in the area where the hidden platform actually was, compared to straight and lesbian women.

Dr Rahman explains: “Not only did straight men get started on the MWM test more quickly than gay men and the two female groups, they also maintained that advantage throughout the test. This might mean that sexual orientation affects the speed at which you acquire spatial information, but not necessarily your eventual memory for that spatial information."

“In previous studies we have also found that gay men tend to use similar navigation strategies to women, like using land-marks, and we now want to explore whether navigation strategies on these virtual navigation tasks are also the same for gay men and women. In particular, we are interested in whether heterosexual men are using a unique strategy from their first attempt at traversing a new environment, which accounts for why they are so quick off the mark.”

The researchers also found that gay and straight men were similar in their performance on the Radial Arm Maze. “This suggests that sexual variation in spatial cognition is not straightforward – gay people appear to show a ‘mosaic’ of performance, parts of which are male-like and other parts of which are female-like,” adds Rahman.

Dr Rahman also commented that it would be interesting to see if these sexual differences change with age. “We know that spatial ability declines more rapidly in men with age than in women, and this might be related to changing hormone profiles. This may have some relevance to sex differences in ageing-related diseases of cognitive functioning, such as dementia.

“If we can understand more about how people of different sexes and sexualities differ in spatial performance, we might be able to tailor cognitive remediation therapies more effectively to specific groups within an ageing population.”