Project Details
Projekt
Regulation of the eusocial genome
Applicants
Dr. Sonja Grath; Antonella Soro, Ph.D.
Subject Area
Evolution, Anthropology
Term
since 2022
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 503229828
“Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine”. François Jacob (1977). Evolution and Tinkering. Science, 196:1161– 1166 Eusociality is a major evolutionary innovation that has independently evolved multiple times across the insects. Using one lineage of halictid bees (Hymenoptera: Halictini) in which eusociality has arisen once, been elaborated upon and subsequently lost repeatedly, we investigated in the preceding project of phase I of GEvol the variation in gene expression and its regulation associated with the gain and subsequent loss of eusociality. Results from this preceding project provided indirect support for the idea that the evolutionary origin of eusociality is rooted in the developmental plasticity of ancestral behavioural traits (working and reproducing), predicted to be coupled in the solitary ancestor and decoupled in the eusocial descendent. Our data suggested that the different social phenotypes that are the hallmark of eusocial systems (queens and workers) might have emerged from evolutionary changes in the way ancient genes are expressed, i.e. from changes in gene regulatory networks. In this follow-up project, we rely again on the socially variable halictid bees for a cross-species comparison of ancestrally solitary, eusocial and derived solitary species to study how shifts in gene expression that we have observed in phase I are regulated, with the aim of understanding the extent to which the origin of eusociality is ascribable to changes in regulatory mechanisms. We intend to: i) identify regulatory elements that act as regulatory switches of gene expression through the integration of deep learning approaches and multi-omics data (RNAseq, ATACseq, CUT&Tag, EMseq); ii) study how these regulatory elements evolved; and iii) investigate the extent to which conserved genes, such as developmental genes and genes involved in sex differentiation, have been co-opted for eusociality. Our proposed study will contribute to a better understanding of the genetic origins of biological novelties, of which eusociality is one of the most intriguing.
DFG Programme
Priority Programmes
Co-Investigator
Professor Dr. Robert Paxton
