Social isolation and group size are associated with divergent gene expression in the brain of ant queens.
Social isolation and group size are associated with divergent gene expression in the brain of ant queens.
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DOI：
10.1111/gbb.12758
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发表时间：
2022-03
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--
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社会生活和孤立对生物体构成了一系列复杂的挑战，促使神经状态发生重大变化。然而，大脑如何应对社会挑战的可塑性在很大程度上仍未被探索。红火蚁Solenopsis invicta为研究这一点提供了理想的场景。火蚁后可能会单独或以多达30只蚁后的群体出现，这取决于关键因素，如新交配的蚁后的密度和筑巢地点的可用性。我们人为地操纵了筑巢地点的可用性，以测试大脑如何在两个关键时间点（早期与晚期殖民地建立）和群体规模（大型与小型群体）对社会与孤独殖民地建立做出反应。我们采用了一种强大的神经基因组学方法来识别处理组之间基因表达的细微差异，我们建立了一个火蚁大脑的全球基因共表达网络，以识别与社会环境的不同组成部分特异性相关的基因模块。群体和单个蚁后之间的差异只涉及一个基因，当蚁后的行为仍然是可塑的，蚁后可以从一种模式切换到另一种模式，而数百个基因参与了这个过程的后期，当行为失去了最初的可塑性，更渠道化。此外，我们发现大群体与基因表达的变化比小群体更大，这表明即使是社会环境中潜在的细微差异也可能与不同的神经基因组状态有关。暴露于社会隔离和不同的群体规模与火蚁后大脑中基因表达水平的显着变化有关。
Social life and isolation pose a complex suite of challenges to organisms prompting significant changes in neural state. However, plasticity in how brains respond to social challenges remains largely unexplored. The fire ants Solenopsis invicta provide an ideal scenario for examining this. Fire ant queens may found colonies individually or in groups of up to 30 queens, depending on key factors such as density of newly mated queens and availability of nesting sites. We artificially manipulated availability of nesting sites to test how the brain responds to social versus solitary colony founding at two key timepoints (early vs. late colony founding) and to group size (large vs. small groups). We adopted a powerful neurogenomic approach to identify even subtle differences of gene expression between treatment groups, and we built a global gene co‐expression network of the fire ant brain to identify gene modules specifically associated with the different components of the social environment. The difference between group and single founding queens involves only one gene when founding behavior is still plastic and queens can switch from one modality to another, while hundreds of genes are involved later in the process, when behaviors have lost the initial plasticity and are more canalized. Furthermore, we find that large groups are associated with greater changes in gene expression than small groups, showing that even potentially subtle differences in the social environment can be linked to different neurogenomic states. Exposure to social isolation and varying group size are associated with significant changes in the levels of expression of genes in the brain of fire ant queens.
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