Royal jelly, a thick, milky substance secreted by young nurse honeybees to feed a bee colonyâs larvae, most notably the queen larvae, is a rich source of nutrients, as well as acetycholine, a neurotransmitter that plays a critical role in cognitive function.
The origin of the eukaryotic cell is a milestone in the evolution of life, since eukaryotes include all complex cells and almost all multicellular organisms. The timing of this series of events is hard to determine; Knoll (2006) suggests they developed approximately 1.6â2.1 billion years ago.
In 1996 the first eukaryotic genome (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) was sequenced. S. cerevisiae, a model organism in biology has a genome of only around 12 million nucleotide pairs, and was the first unicellular eukaryote to have its whole genome sequenced. The first multicellular eukaryote, and animal, to have its whole genome sequenced was the nematode worm: Caenorhabditis elegans in 1998.