Exploiting sociogenomics datasets for understanding phenotypic plasticity

确定生物多样性是如何从生命的最基本组成部分（即基因）产生的，是我们对环境及其生物多样性的理解和可持续管理的基础。它也是揭示生物复杂性在生命进化过程中如何产生和维持的基础。在快速变化的全球环境中，不仅仅是种群中个体之间的基因变异对它们的长期生存至关重要；行为灵活性也可能对生存至关重要，因为它允许生物体对环境变化做出快速反应。这种行为可塑性是在基因水平上调节的；基因对环境线索作出反应，改变其表达，从而导致产生的蛋白质类型和数量的变化。这会影响细胞的行为，最终影响整个生物体的行为。我们对控制基因组和环境之间相互作用的基本分子过程的理解目前是有限的，特别是对具有生态意义的野生生物。生物学正在进入“组学”时代，在这个时代，可以很容易地产生关于表型灵活性、适应性和弹性背后的大范围分子过程的数据。直到最近，这些数据集还仅限于一些实验室生物。分子技术的进步意味着我们现在可以对自然种群中的任何生物体提出这些问题。这种潜力对环境科学具有不可估量的好处，因为环境科学需要在有意义的生态环境中研究生物。然而，目前，我们生成这种“组学”数据的能力远远超过了我们分析和解释这些数据的能力。该提案要求适度的资源来利用现有的生态重要生物体的基因组数据集，以解决生物学中长期存在的问题，同时为生态学家发展信息学技能和资源。群居昆虫是测试生态和进化问题的一个强大的模型系统，了解它们的合作社会是如何运作的，可能会让我们对自己的社会有更深入的了解。社会昆虫也占昆虫传粉者的很大一部分，我们依赖它们来确保全球粮食安全，但它们目前正面临全球人口减少的问题。在昆虫社会中，所有个体共享相同的基因组，这被翻译成许多不同的身体和/或行为形式（即蜂王和工蜂种姓）。一个人的种姓取决于他所处的环境（如营养、社会、生态）。在小群体和简单社会组织的物种（如Polistes纸黄蜂）中，个体表现出难以置信的能力，能够快速响应环境的变化而在种姓之间切换。因此，对于理解表型多样性和适应性是如何在基因水平上产生的，它们是很好的生物。然而，从分子的角度来看，这些简单的昆虫群落仍然相对缺乏研究。我们建议利用现有的数据集来探索一系列社会昆虫物种的行为表型的基因组基础。我们探索在多大程度上相似的表型是由所有物种共享的基因（“保守基因”）或特定物种特有的基因（“新基因”）所决定的。我们将首次分析社会性昆虫的基因表达和蛋白质产生之间的关系，使我们能够确定参与调节表型变化的基因。我们将通过一个研讨会与其他研究人员和可能的利益相关者分享我们的学习和成果，在这个研讨会上，我们将探讨基因水平研究在生态、保护和环境可持续性方面的更广泛价值。因此，我们希望这个项目将在本地和更广泛的科学界培养计算科学家和生态学家之间的创新和长期合作。

Determining how biological diversity is generated from the most basic building blocks of life (i.e. the genes) is fundamental to our understanding and sustainable stewardship of the environment and its biodiversity. It is also fundamental for revealing how biological complexity arises and is maintained during the evolution of life. In a rapidly changing global environment it is not just genetic variation between individuals in a population that will prove essential to their long-term survival; behavioural flexibility is also likely to be crucial to survival, as it permits an organism to respond rapidly to environmental change. Such behavioural plasticity is mediated at the level of the genes; genes respond to environmental cues, changing their expression, resulting in changes in the types and quantities of proteins produced. This affects the behaviour of cells, and ultimately, of the organism as a whole. Our understanding of the fundamental molecular processes which govern interactions between genome and environment is currently limited, especially for wild organisms in ecologically meaningful contexts.Biology is entering the 'omics era, where data on the broad-scale molecular processes underlying phenotype flexibility, adaptation and resilience can be easily produced. Until recently, these datasets were limited to a few lab-based organisms. Advances in molecular technologies means we can now ask these questions of any organism in natural populations. This potential is of immeasurable benefit to the environmental sciences, where organisms need to be studied in meaningful ecological contexts. However, currently, our ability to generate such 'omics data far out-strips our capacity to analyse and interpret it. This proposal requests modest resources to exploit existing genomic datasets on ecologically important organisms, to address long-standing questions in biology and simultaneously develop informatics skills and resources for ecologists. Social insects are a powerful model system for testing ecological and evolutionary questions, and understanding how their cooperative societies function may give insights into our own. Social insects also constitute a vast proportion of the insect pollinators on whom we depend for assuring global food security, but who are currently facing global population declines. Within an insect society, all individuals share the same genome, which is translated into many different physical and / or behavioural forms (namely, queen and worker castes). Which caste an individual becomes depends on its environment (e.g. nutritional, social, ecological). In species with small colonies and simple social organisation (e.g. Polistes paper wasps), individuals show incredible ability to switch between castes in rapid response to changes in their environment. They are therefore excellent organisms for understanding how phenotypic diversity and adaptability are generated at the level of the genes. Yet, these simple insect societies remain relatively understudied from a molecular perspective. We propose to exploit existing datasets to probe the genomic basis of behavioural phenotypes in a range of social insect species. We explore to what extent similar phenotypes are underlain by genes shared across all species ('conserved genes'), or genes that are specific to a particular species ('novel genes'). We will provide a first analysis of the relationship between gene expression and protein production in social insects, allowing us to identify the genes involved in regulating phenotypic change. We will share our learning and results with other researchers and putative stakeholders through a workshop, where the broader value of gene-level research in ecology, conservation and environmental sustainability will be explored. Thus, we hope that this project will nurture innovative and long-term collaborations between computational scientists and ecologist both locally and in the wider scientific community.