As the most ancient sense in nature, chemical communication plays a major role in successful mating, host and selection and other essential behaviors.
This becomes crucial in social insects, where a complicated and delicate system of signals must be maintained in order to preserve the fragile equilibrium between the queen and the workers.
Pheromone binding proteins are soluble proteins invovled in the early stages of pheromone detection.
As a model protein of this family we will further describe the well investigated Pheromone binding protein of the honey bee.
Pheromone-binding protein ASP of the honeybee Apis mellifera L. (Hymenoptera: Apidea) was first isolated and characterized by Danty et al. (1998)[1] from the bee antennae.
or to the article describing Jmol [2] to the rescue.
Structure
The protein has a .
Full crystallographic information is available from OCA.
Function
Structural highlights
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