Speaker
Description
Bees, especially bumblebees, are crucial to ecosystems and humanity as pollinators, supporting biodiversity and crop production. However, their populations are declining related to global warming, pesticides, invasive species, pathogens, and agricultural intensification. Effective conservation requires a deep understanding of bee-environment interactions and efficient health monitoring. Mass spectrometry-based metabolomics, still underexplored for bumblebees, is a powerful tool for assessing their physiological state.
We applied a GCMS-based multiselective workflow to Bombus terrestris (large earth bumblebee) to establish an approach for future stress assessment in ecological metabolomics. Five B. terrestris specimens, reared at MLU Halle, were dissected into tissues, extracted with an aqueous-methanolic mixture, and analysed via GC-EI-MS. Semi-automated peak picking (AMDIS) and spectral database matching (NIST, HMDB, Golm) yielded a metabolite inventory of 340 compounds, with 214 tentatively identified. Compounds were collected in a custom mass spectral library for future use as a first major outcome of our work. Identified metabolites include mono- and di-sugars, sugar alcohols and acids, amino acids, organic carboxylates, nucleobases and others, covering central primary metabolism (e.g., citrate cycle), suitable for stress detection (e.g., malnutrition). Amino acid pathways were also accessible, enabling monitoring of regulation between lipid, protein, and sugar metabolism. Metabolite profiles strongly differed between body parts: e.g. amino acids were elevated in the gut region (reflecting microbiome metabolism), while energy metabolism compounds dominated in head and thorax. In addition to compound detection and identification, we also explored the use of dissection liquid and detailed organ dissection leading to unfavourable risks of metabolite leakage and cross-contamination between body compartments requiring improvements in future protocols.
Overall, our approach provides a promising foundation for ecological bumblebee studies, enabling simultaneous quantitative assessment of metabolites indicative of stress or biotic interactions. Differential responses across body parts may guide future dissection strategies for targeted sensitive biomarker assessment.
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