The Molecular Basis of Caste Development and Evolution in Ants

项目摘要 遗传因素对人类健康的影响高度依赖于其他因素 基因组中的基因以及外部环境的影响。了解如何 功能性生物系统源于环境和遗传的整合 信息是一个对医学有影响的核心研究挑战， 农业，以及我们的全球生态对不断变化的环境的反应。在蚂蚁身上， 环境信号，包括社会互动和营养，导致发展 幼虫成年后分化成不同的形态种姓。这些人 合作形成一个连贯的社会单位，类似于细胞的表观遗传过程 分化和细胞信号传导是单一生物体发育的基础。 蚂蚁的种姓发展提供了一个机会来了解环境如何 信息可以在整个动物水平上诱导替代遗传程序。 此外，对种姓的研究将使我们能够了解异质群体如何 个体合作产生功能性集体行为的方式，以及 这些群体可以发展。所有这些主题都与遗传和基因直接相关。 人类生理学的细胞基础，可以极大地提高我们对 人类健康。 为了识别和描述蚂蚁种姓发展的核心机制，这 该提案提出了一个涵盖多个尺度的综合研究计划 生物组织：1）利用功能性遗传操作和突变体 图书馆从发展的角度研究种姓，使用高度控制和 重复实验方法。 2）人口学最新进展的应用 和比较基因组学，以了解自然种姓进化的遗传基础 蚂蚁种群和使用实验室实验验证结果。 3）一代 现存和化石蚂蚁物种种姓形态的大型数据库， 以及应用这些数据来测试有关机制如何的具体预测 种姓的发展既限制又促进了种姓的演变 蚂蚁。这项研究将为种姓提供一些初步的机制见解 发展和进化，并将促进表观遗传学的统一理解， 表型可塑性和生物系统中的新兴特性。

PROJECT ABSTRACT The effects of genetic elements on human health are highly dependent both on other genes in the genome as well as external environmental influences. Understanding how functional biological systems arise from the integration of environmental and genetic information is a central research challenge that has implications for medicine, agriculture, and the response of our global ecology to a changing environment. In ants, environmental signals, including social interactions and nutrition, cause developing larvae to differentiate into distinct morphological castes as adults. These individuals cooperate to form a coherent social unit, analogous to the epigenetic processes of cell differentiation and cell signaling that underpin the development of unitary organisms. Caste development in ants provides an opportunity to understand how environmental information can induce alternative genetic programs at the level of an entire animal. Furthermore, the study of castes will allow us to understand how heterogeneous groups of individuals cooperate to produce functional collective behaviors, and the way that these groups can evolve. All of these topics are directly relevant to the genetic and cellular basis of human physiology and could greatly improve our understanding of human health. To identify and characterize the core mechanisms of caste development in ants, this proposal presents an integrative research program that spans multiple scales of biological organization: 1) The use of functional genetic manipulations and mutant libraries to study caste from a developmental perspective using highly controlled and replicated experimental methods. 2) The application of recent advances in population and comparative genomics to understand the genetic basis of caste evolution in natural ant populations and validation of results using laboratory experiments. 3) The generation of a large-scale database of caste morphology across both living and fossil ant species, and the application of these data to test specific predictions about how the mechanisms of caste development have constrained and facilitated caste evolution throughout the ants. This research will provide some of the first mechanistic insights into caste development and evolution, and will promote a unified understanding of epigenetics, phenotypic plasticity, and emergent properties in biological systems.