Very happy to have our latest paper published in iScience!

Sexual dimorphisms of the olfactory system are conserved across bumblebee species

Jorn Oppersma, Wenke E, W. Carolina Gomez-Ramirez, Iman Muktar, Timothy Wise, Miranda Bolton, Shuang Chen, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei, Carlo Polidori, and Olena Riabinina

This interdisciplinary study is based on the Masters project by amazing Jorn Oppersma, and combines confocal imaging, field collections, immuhistochemistry, electron microscopy and computer vision.

We have compared brain anatomy of 6 common bumblebee species, wild workers and males of which were collected around Durham, UK. We focused on their olfactory brain center, the Antennal Lobe. We observed striking and consistent differences between sexes and species, with males having fewer glomeruli, smaller ALs and fewer olfactory sensilla. We also observed that number and locations of macroglomeruli in males are conserved between species. Finally, we developed a pipeline for automatic segmentation of glomeruli from confocal images, which is very time-consuming when done manually.

This study greatly extends our knowledge of insect brain anatomy, with 5 of the study 6 species not previously described, and sets the stage for future functional studies of these important pollinators.