Engineered yeast provides rare but essential pollen sterols for honeybees.

ABSTRACT: Honeybees are important crop pollinators, but they increasingly face pollen starvation as a result of agricultural intensification and climate change¹. Frequent flowering dearth periods and high-density rearing conditions weaken colonies, which often leads to their demise². Beekeepers provide colonies with pollen substitutes, but these feeds do not sustain brood production because they lack essential sterols found in pollen^3,4. Here we describe a technological advance in honeybee nutrition with wide-reaching impacts on global food security. We first measured the quantity and proportion of sterols present in honeybee tissues. Using this information, we genetically engineered a strain of the oleaginous yeast Yarrowia lipolytica to produce a mixture of essenti

SUBMITTER: Moore E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12507675 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature