ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Maternal effect killing by a supergene controlling ant social organization.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
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Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 44 citations in OpenAlex.
- Developmental bias of body size and caste by the fire ant social supergene.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2026Article
- Genome Evolution in Social Insects.Genome biology and evolution · 2026Review
- Ancient but dynamic: structural expansion, massive gene duplication, and transposable element colonization in a supergene controlling ant social organization.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Sequential origin of an alternative colony founding strategy driven by two supergenes in Temnothorax ants.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Supergene regulation of ant social organization: a P haplotype in workers shifts colony ontogeny towards multiple queens.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Biased social chromosome transmission in males of the fire ant Solenopsis invicta.G3 (Bethesda, Md.) · 2025Article
- A supergene-controlling social structure in Alpine ants also affects the dispersal ability and fecundity of each sex.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Evolutionary genomics of socially polymorphic populations of Pogonomyrmex californicus.BMC biology · 2024Article
- Social antagonism facilitates supergene expansion in ants.Current biology : CB · 2023Article
- Radiation and hybridization underpin the spread of the fire ant social supergene.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- A socially polymorphic Formica ant species exhibits a novel distribution of social supergene genotypes.Journal of evolutionary biology · 2022Article
- Genomic architecture of supergenes: connecting form and function.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Iterative evolution of supergene-based social polymorphism in ants.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Unbalanced selection: the challenge of maintaining a social polymorphism when a supergene is selfish.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- A novel distribution of supergene genotypes is present in the socially polymorphic ant Formica neoclara.BMC ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Intralocus conflicts associated with a supergene.Nature communications · 2022Article
- Supergenes, supergenomes, and complex social traits.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2022Article
- Linked supergenes underlie split sex ratio and social organization in an ant.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The Genomic Architecture and Evolutionary Fates of Supergenes.Genome biology and evolution · 2021Review
- Disentangling the mechanisms linking dispersal and sociality in supergene-mediated ant social forms.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Article
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4 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Supergenes underlie striking polymorphisms in nature, yet the evolutionary mechanisms by which they arise and persist remain enigmatic. These clusters of linked loci can spread in populations because they captured coadapted alleles or by selfishly distorting the laws of Mendelian inheritance. Here, we show that the supergene haplotype associated with multiple-queen colonies in Alpine silver ants is a maternal effect killer. All eggs from heterozygous queens failed to hatch when they did not inherit this haplotype. Hence, the haplotype specific to multiple-queen colonies is a selfish genetic element that enhances its own transmission by causing developmental arrest of progeny that do not carry it. At the population level, such transmission ratio distortion favors the spread of multiple-queen colonies, to the detriment of the alternative haplotype associated with single-queen colonies. Hence, selfish gene drive by one haplotype will impact the evolutionary dynamics of alternative forms of colony social organization. This killer hidden in a social supergene shows that large nonrecombining genomic regions are prone to cause multifarious effects across levels of biological organization.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.