Assessment and comparison of two different methods to extract nucleic acids from individual honey bees

The honey bee is an excellent model system to study behavior ecology, behavioral genetics, and sociogenomics. Nucleic acid based analyses enable a broad scope of research in functional genomics, disease diagnostics, mutant screening, and genetic breeding. Multiple levels of analysis lead to a more comprehensive understanding of the causes of phenotypic variation by integrating genomic variation, transcriptomic profiles, and epigenomic information. One limitation, however, is the sample preparation procedures to obtain high quality DNA and RNA simultaneously, particularly from small amounts of material, such as tissues of individual bees. We demonstrate that it is feasible to perform dual extractions of DNA and RNA from a single individual bee and compare the quality and quantity of the extracted nucleic acids using two different types of methods (column based versus ethanol precipitation). We obtained a higher yield of both DNA and RNA with one of the extraction methods over the other, although the quality of the DNA and RNA was not significantly different between methods. We describe here the first validated method for dual extraction of DNA and RNA specifically from individual honey bees.