mKast is dispensable for normal development and sexual maturation of the male European honeybee

The European honeybee (Apis mellifera L.) exhibits various social behaviors. The molecular and neural mechanisms underlying these behaviors have long been explored, but causal relations between genes or neurons and behaviors remain to be elucidated because effective gene manipulation methods in the honeybee have not been available until recently. We recently established a basic technology to produce mutant honeybee drones using CRISPR/Cas9. Here we produced mutant drones using CRISPR/Cas9 targeting mKast, which is preferentially expressed in a certain subtype of class I Kenyon cells that comprise the mushroom bodies in the honeybee brain. By immunoblot analysis, we showed that mKast protein expression was completely lost in the mutant drone heads. In addition, during the production process of homozygous mutant workers, we demonstrated that heterozygous mutant workers could be produced by artificial insemination of wild-type queens with the sperm of mutant drones, indicating that mKast mutant drones were sexually mature. These results demonstrate that mKast is dispensable for normal development and sexual maturation in drone honeybees, and allow us to proceed with the production of homozygous mutant workers for the analysis of a particular gene by gene knockout in the future.