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An unusual study that involved bar coding and tracking the behavior of thousands of individual honey bees in six queenless bee hives and analyzing gene expression in their brains offers new insights into how gene regulation contributes to social behavior.

Tissues and cells in the human body are subjected to a constant push and pull – strained by other cells, blood pressure and fluid flow, to name a few. The type and direction of the force on a cell alters gene expression by stretching different regions of DNA, researchers at Illinois and collaborators in China found in a new study.

The findings could provide insights into physiology and diseases such as fibrosis, cardiovascular disease and malignant cancer, the researchers said.

Cells will ramp up gene expression in response to physical forces alone, a new study finds. Gene activation, the first step of protein production, starts less than one millisecond after a cell is stretched - hundreds of times faster than chemical signals can travel, the researchers report.

The scientists tested forces that are biologically relevant - equivalent to those exerted on human cells by breathing, exercising or vocalizing. They report their findings in the journal Science Advances.

A University of Illinois and Mayo collaboration has demonstrated a novel gene expression analysis technique that can accurately measure levels of RNA quickly and directly from a cancerous tissue sample while preserving the spatial information across the tissue —something that conventional methods cannot do. The team's gene expression technique is described in a paper published today in the online edition of Nature Communications.