ArticleJournal of evolutionary biology2015
Evolutionarily advanced ant farmers rear polyploid fungal crops.
Article in Journal of evolutionary biology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed, 62 citations in OpenAlex.
- Leafcutter Ant Farmers Prevent Loss of Edible Symbiotic Structures by Maintaining Allelic Diversity in Their Multinucleate Fungal Crop.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Evidence of cellular adaptations in a fungal cultivar promoting resource exchange with leafcutter ant farmers.Biology letters · 2025Article
- Genomic Signatures of Domestication in a Fungus Obligately Farmed by Leafcutter Ants.Molecular biology and evolution · 2024Article
- Article
- Male-biased dispersal in a fungus-gardening ant symbiosis.Ecology and evolution · 2021Article
- Article
- Nutritional niches reveal fundamental domestication trade-offs in fungus-farming ants.Nature ecology & evolution · 2021Article
- Genome Size Versus Genome Assemblies: Are the Genomes Truly Expanded in Polyploid Fungal Symbionts?Genome biology and evolution · 2020Article
- Large-scale generation and analysis of filamentous fungal DNA barcodes boosts coverage for kingdom fungi and reveals thresholds for fungal species and higher taxon delimitation.Studies in mycology · 2019Article
- Evolutionary maintenance of genomic diversity within arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.Ecology and evolution · 2019Article
- The evolution of abdominal microbiomes in fungus-growing ants.Molecular ecology · 2019Article
- Article
- Chemical warfare between leafcutter ant symbionts and a co-evolved pathogen.Nature communications · 2018Article
- Dry habitats were crucibles of domestication in the evolution of agriculture in ants.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2017Article
- Unholy marriages and eternal triangles: how competition in the mushroom life cycle can lead to genomic conflict.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2016Review
- Nutrition mediates the expression of cultivar-farmer conflict in a fungus-growing ant.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Article
- The good, the bad and the tasty: The many roles of mushrooms.Studies in mycology · 2016Article
- Reciprocal genomic evolution in the ant-fungus agricultural symbiosis.Nature communications · 2016Article
- Ant mediated redistribution of a xyloglucanase enzyme in fungus gardens of Acromyrmex echinatior.BMC microbiology · 2016Article
- Somatic incompatibility and genetic structure of fungal crops in sympatricFungal ecology · 2015Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Innovative evolutionary developments are often related to gene or genome duplications. The crop fungi of attine fungus-growing ants are suspected to have enhanced genetic variation reminiscent of polyploidy, but this has never been quantified with cytological data and genetic markers. We estimated the number of nuclei per fungal cell for 42 symbionts reared by 14 species of Panamanian fungus-growing ants. This showed that domesticated symbionts of higher attine ants are polykaryotic with 7-17 nuclei per cell, whereas nonspecialized crops of lower attines are dikaryotic similar to most free-living basidiomycete fungi. We then investigated how putative higher genetic diversity is distributed across polykaryotic mycelia, using microsatellite loci and evaluating models assuming that all nuclei are either heterogeneously haploid or homogeneously polyploid. Genetic variation in the polykaryotic symbionts of the basal higher attine genera Trachymyrmex and Sericomyrmex was only slightly enhanced, but the evolutionarily derived crop fungi of Atta and Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants had much higher genetic variation. Our opposite ploidy models indicated that the symbionts of Trachymyrmex and Sericomyrmex are likely to be lowly and facultatively polyploid (just over two haplotypes on average), whereas Atta and Acromyrmex symbionts are highly and obligatorily polyploid (ca. 5-7 haplotypes on average). This stepwise transition appears analogous to ploidy variation in plants and fungi domesticated by humans and in fungi domesticated by termites and plants, where gene or genome duplications were typically associated with selection for higher productivity, but allopolyploid chimerism was incompatible with sexual reproduction.
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