ArticleMolecular biology and evolution2015
How Do Genomes Create Novel Phenotypes? Insights from the Loss of the Worker Caste in Ant Social Parasites.
Article in Molecular biology and evolution, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 22 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
22 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-Analysis of Public RNA Sequencing Data Revealed Potential Key Genes Associated with Reproductive Division of Labor in Social Hymenoptera and Termites.International journal of molecular sciences · 2023Pooled it
- Reference genome of the kidnapper ant, Polyergus mexicanus.The Journal of heredity · 2025Article
- Genome assembly of the temporary socially parasitic spiny ant Polyrhachis lamellidens and its host Camponotus japonicus.DNA research : an international journal for rapid publication of reports on genes and genomes · 2025Article
- Parthenogenetic Stick Insects Exhibit Signatures of Preservation in the Molecular Architecture of Male Reproduction.Genome biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Evolution of five environmentally responsive gene families in a pine-feeding sawfly,Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Sexual dimorphism as a facilitator of worker caste evolution in ants.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Mining Amphibian and Insect Transcriptomes for Antimicrobial Peptide Sequences with rAMPage.Antibiotics (Basel, Switzerland) · 2022Article
- Hymenoptera Genome Database: new genomes and annotation datasets for improved go enrichment and orthologue analyses.Nucleic acids research · 2022Article
- Relaxed selection underlies genome erosion in socially parasitic ant species.Nature communications · 2021Article
- Gene expression during larval caste determination and differentiation in intermediately eusocial bumblebees, and a comparative analysis with advanced eusocial honeybees.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Genome assembly and annotation of the California harvester ant Pogonomyrmex californicus.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2021Article
- Ant behaviour and brain gene expression of defending hosts depend on the ecological success of the intruding social parasite.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Inquiline social parasites as tools to unlock the secrets of insect sociality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2019Article
- Reproductive Dominance Strategies in Insect Social Parasites.Journal of chemical ecology · 2018Review
- The transcriptomic changes associated with the development of social parasitism in the honeybee Apis mellifera capensis.Die Naturwissenschaften · 2018Article
- Genomes of the Hymenoptera.Current opinion in insect science · 2018Review
- Comparative analyses of co-evolving host-parasite associations reveal unique gene expression patterns underlying slavemaker raiding and host defensive phenotypes.Scientific reports · 2018Article
- Limited social plasticity in the socially polymorphic sweat beeBehavioral ecology and sociobiology · 2018Article
- Species-specific genes under selection characterize the co-evolution of slavemaker and host lifestyles.BMC evolutionary biology · 2017Article
- Phylogenetic classifications are informative, stable, and pragmatic: the case for monophyletic taxa.Insectes sociaux · 2016Article
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13 authors.
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Abstract
A central goal of biology is to uncover the genetic basis for the origin of new phenotypes. A particularly effective approach is to examine the genomic architecture of species that have secondarily lost a phenotype with respect to their close relatives. In the eusocial Hymenoptera, queens and workers have divergent phenotypes that may be produced via either expression of alternative sets of caste-specific genes and pathways or differences in expression patterns of a shared set of multifunctional genes. To distinguish between these two hypotheses, we investigated how secondary loss of the worker phenotype in workerless ant social parasites impacted genome evolution across two independent origins of social parasitism in the ant genera Pogonomyrmex and Vollenhovia. We sequenced the genomes of three social parasites and their most-closely related eusocial host species and compared gene losses in social parasites with gene expression differences between host queens and workers. Virtually all annotated genes were expressed to some degree in both castes of the host, with most shifting in queen-worker bias across developmental stages. As a result, despite >1 My of divergence from the last common ancestor that had workers, the social parasites showed strikingly little evidence of gene loss, damaging mutations, or shifts in selection regime resulting from loss of the worker caste. This suggests that regulatory changes within a multifunctional genome, rather than sequence differences, have played a predominant role in the evolution of social parasitism, and perhaps also in the many gains and losses of phenotypes in the social insects.
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