Abstract
Solid theoretical frameworks explain the tradeoffs involved in social evolution. In comparison, our empirical understanding of the underlying processes remains limited.
We recently demonstrated that alternate versions of a pair of social chromosomes determine whether a fire ant colony accepts exactly one or up to hundreds of queens. Surprisingly, similar regions of suppressed recombination independently underly polymorphic social behaviour in several other species (convergent evolution).
By combining data from long-molecule sequences (10X genomics, Oxford Nanopore) with bioinformatics analyses (and potentially experimental work), this project will answer major questions about the birth and evolution of social chromosomes.
References
- Pracana R, Priyam A, Levantis I, Nichols R, Wurm Y (2017) The fire ant social chromosome supergene variant Sb shows low diversity but high divergence from SB. Molecular Ecology.
- Wang J, Wurm Y, Nipitwattanaphon M, Riba-Grognuz O, Huang YC, Shoemaker D, Keller L (2013) A Y-like social chromosome causes alternative colony organization in fire ants. Nature. 493:664-8.
- Purcell J, Brelsford A, Wurm Y, Perrin N, Chapuisat M (2014) Convergent genetic architecture underlies social organization in ants. Current Biology. 24:2728-32.
- Wright AR, Dean R, Zimmer F, Mank JE (2016) How to make a sex chromosome. Nature Communications in press
- Priyam A, Woodcroft BJ, Rai V, Munagala A, Moghul I, Ter F, Gibbins MA, Moon H, Leonard G, Rumpf W, Wurm Y (2015) Sequenceserver: a modern graphical user interface for custom BLAST databases. bioRxiv. 033142.