Project description
Revealing the mechanism behind unusual forms of insect reproduction
Royalty in social insects is usually determined by their environment rather than genetics. However, an exception to this rule is social hybridogenesis. An example of the latter is when two ants of royal lineage can only produce queens, while producing workers requires mating with a member outside that lineage. Although this reproductive method is common, the underlying mechanism remains a mystery. The EU-funded RoyalMess project seeks to explain this by studying the prevalence of such a reproductive system and the history of royal lineages, and identifying caste-determining genes. The study could reveal how this common reproductive system functions and how such a clear genetic divide can become genetically hardwired.
Objective
Royalty in social insects is typically environmentally acquired rather than genetically determined. However, this is not the case in an exceptional reproductive system, known as social hybridogenesis. Here, two distinct royal lineages of ants can only produce queens by their own while they need to hybridize to produce workers. Eggs with a pure royal genome are thus genetically fated to become queens while hybrid genomes are fated to become workers. Convergent evolution toward such a baroque reproductive strategy appears common in harvester ant species (four times in Pogonomyrmex and Messor genera), but its origin is still completely mysterious. In this project, I plan to unravel the evolution of this unique system via cutting-edge genomic and molecular approaches.
1. Prevalence of social hybridogenesis: I will use genome-wide sequence data to identify novel occurrences of social hybridogenesis across ~500 ant species, in search for potential ecological determinants (e.g. climate or diet) that could favour evolution towards genetic caste determination.
2. History of royal lineages: I will use population genomics in three pairs of Messor royal lineages to trace back their evolutionary origin. For this, I will develop a novel ABC method to map introgressions and selective sweeps along royal lineage genomes to detect past hybridization events or fixation of potentially selfish caste-biasing alleles.
3. Identifying caste-determining genes: I will use comparative transcriptomics in early ant embryos to identify genes differentially expressed between castes before developmental divergence. Candidate genes will be experimentally validated via i) controlled matings between pure-lineage queens and lab-produced recombinant males and ii) genome editing via the CRISPR-Cas9 technology.
If successful, this project will enable the first genetic manipulation of ant royalty, deciphering how such an iconic example of phenotypic plasticity can become genetically hardwired.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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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.
- medical and health sciences health sciences nutrition
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- natural sciences biological sciences genetics genomes
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Programme(s)
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H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)
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75794 PARIS
France
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