Project description
Studying zombie ants to uncover parasite behaviour
In the eerie realm of parasitism, some organisms commandeer their hosts’ behaviour, reminiscent of zombie lore. These parasites manipulate hosts to enhance their own transmission, but our grasp of this phenomenon remains limited. The ERC-funded ZOMBIHAVIOUR project aims to bridge this gap by focusing on ‘zombie ants’, infected by Ophiocordyceps fungi. These fungi compel ants to ascend vegetation and die, ensuring spore dispersal. The project leverages advanced fungal culturing and behavioural assays to map these changes. By applying molecular genetics, RNASeq, and functional testing, researchers will dissect the genetic and molecular mechanisms driving these behavioural shifts. These findings are expected to deepen our understanding of parasite-host interactions and pave the way for new pest control and therapeutic strategies.
Objective
Reminiscent of zombies in pop culture, some parasites hijack host behaviours. Our understanding of this parasite strategy to improve transmission is minimal, despite its convergent evolution across major taxa. Functional genetics studies would advance our knowledge of the molecular underpinnings of “zombie behaviour”. Additionally, learning how behaviour can be altered would elucidate how “normal” phenotypes are maintained. However, most zombie-making parasites and their hosts are not classic model organisms, which complicates mechanistic interrogation.
The so-called “zombie ants’ can be used to study parasite hijacking of animal behaviour in more detail. Zombie ants are infected by Ophiocordyceps fungi that cause summit disease. Infected ants ascend vegetation that they bite into as they die to ensure fungal spore dispersal. My lab developed fungal culturing techniques, infection methods and behavioural assays to detail infection-related changes in daily ant foraging, communication, and locomotion. Additionally, by integrating multi-omics tools, we identified candidate fungal products and ant host pathways that might underlie the behavioural changes observed. However, to move from correlation to causation these candidates need to be functionally tested.
By leveraging my lab’s pioneering work and my training in molecular microbiology I aim to elucidate the molecular genetics underlying parasite hijacking of host behaviour. I propose to 1) adopt molecular genetics tools to characterise fungal products that induce altered host behavioural phenotypes, 2) use RNASeq and RNAi to investigate the affected ant pathways that give rise to those phenotypes, and 3) further establish involvement of these behavioural pathways through integration of the animal model Drosophila melanogaster.
The proposed work will be transformative in our understanding of parasite manipulation strategies and spark novel research into sustainable pest control strategies and fungus-derived drugs.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- natural sciences biological sciences microbiology mycology
- natural sciences biological sciences genetics RNA
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Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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(opens in new window) ERC-2023-COG
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3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands
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