科学家使工蜂生产加强型蜂王浆

 ,Chia-Nan Chen and colleagues explain that royal jelly is a thick liquid made up of proteins, sugars and fats that is secreted⁴（分泌） by glands ⁵ in the throats and jaws ⁶ of worker bees and fed to larvae. Workers feed all bee larvae RJ for the first three days of their lives, but only the queen gets it throughout life, growing larger and living up to 15 times longer than other bees. The scientists treated worker bees with drugs called histone（组蛋白） deacetylase（脱乙酰酶） inhibitors (HDACis) to see whether they could enhance the larvae's growth., ,They found that worker bees given HDACis produced a fortified ⁷ royal jelly that made the queen bee larvae grow to be 2-3 times larger than larvae fed standard royal jelly. A couple HDACis have already been approved for treating certain forms of cancer. The scientists noted ⁸ that this is the first study showing that the composition of RJ can be modified in a way that changes the body size of queen bees during development.