Proline as a fuel for insect flight: enhancing carbohydrate oxidation in hymenopterans
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bees are thought to be strict users of carbohydrates as metabolic fuel for flight. Many insects, however, have the ability to oxidize the amino acid proline at a high rate, which is a unique feature of this group of animals. The presence of proline in the haemolymph of bees and in the nectar of plants led to the hypothesis that plants may produce proline as a metabolic reward for pollinators. We investigated flight muscle metabolism of hymenopteran species using high-resolution respirometry performed on permeabilized muscle fibres. The muscle fibres of the honeybee, Apis mellifera, do not have a detectable capacity to oxidize proline, as those from the migratory locust, Locusta migratoria, used here as an outgroup representative. The closely related bumblebee, Bombus impatiens, can oxidize proline alone and more than doubles its respiratory capacity when proline is combined with carbohydrate-derived substrates. A distant wasp species, Vespula vulgaris, exhibits the same metabolic phenotype as the bumblebee, suggesting that proline oxidation is common in hymenopterans. Using a combination of mitochondrial substrates and inhibitors, we further show that in B. impatiens, proline oxidation provides reducing equivalents and electrons directly to the electron transport system. Together, these findings demonstrate that some bee and wasp species can greatly enhance the oxidation of carbohydrates using proline as fuel for flight.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".