ANTOGENY

A central question in life sciences is to understand the ontogeny of biological systems, which exist at multiple phenotypic scales and function via the cooperation of specialized entities. Examples of such systems include multicellular organisms, which consist of specialized cells, and insect societies (or superorganisms), which are composed of specialized individuals. Both systems are products of major evolutionary transitions, and they share commonalities in their ontogeny, as both develop from a single, pluripotent unit. While the ontogeny of multicellular organisms is well understood, the factors and mechanisms that control the ontogeny of superorganisms remain poorly studied. We aim to fill this knowledge gap with experimental investigations of the process of colony foundation in ants. In most ant species, a new colony is established by a solitary founding queen that expresses behavioral pluripotency to produce the first workers, at which point the queen becomes strictly specialized in egg production. In recent years, we demonstrated that the presence of workers induces the queen behavioral specialization, but also maintains it in mature colonies, as established queens isolated from their workers revert to expressing behavioral pluripotency. These findings raise important mechanistic and evolutionary questions on the social control of queen specialization in the ontogenic process of ant colonies. The project ANTOGENY aims to address these questions to reveal how social interactions control the queen specialization, to determine the molecular basis of such specialization and to understand why the reversibility of queen specialization was maintained over evolutionary time. This project will involve a combination of experimental manipulations of ant colonies, behavioral analyses, epigenetics, transcriptomics, functional genomics, and evolutionary analyses. By shedding light on queen specialization and the ontogeny of superorganisms, ANTOGENY may reshape our understanding of the functioning and evolution of insect societies.