Oral transfer of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones in social insects
Abstract
Social insects frequently engage in oral fluid exchange - trophallaxis - between adults, and between adults and larvae. Although trophallaxis is widely considered a food-sharing mechanism, we hypothesized that endogenous components of this fluid might underlie a novel means of chemical communication between colony members. Through protein and small- molecule mass spectrometry and RNA sequencing, we found that trophallactic fluid in the ant Camponotus floridanus contains a set of specific digestion- and non-digestion related proteins, as well as hydrocarbons, microRNAs, and a key developmental regulator, juvenile hormone. When C. floridanus workers' food was supplemented with this hormone, the larvae they reared via trophallaxis were twice as likely to complete metamorphosis and became larger workers. Comparison of trophallactic fluid proteins across social insect species revealed that many are regulators of growth, development and behavioral maturation. These results suggest that trophallaxis plays previously unsuspected roles in communication and enables communal control of colony phenotypes.
Data availability
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Social exchange of chemical cues, growth proteins and hormones through trophallaxisPublicly available at ProteomeXchange (accession no. PXD004825).
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Camponotus fellah Transcriptome or Gene expressionPublicly available at the NCBI BioProject database (accession no: PRJNA339034).
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Camponotus floridanus Transcriptome or Gene expressionPublicly available at the NCBI BioProject database (accession no: PRJNA338939).
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Research Council (Advanced Grant 249375)
- Laurent Keller
Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung
- Richard Benton
- Laurent Keller
European Research Council (Starting Independent Researcher 205202)
- Richard Benton
European Research Council (Consolidator Grant 615094)
- Richard Benton
Wellcome (Wellcome Trust grant 104640/Z/14/Z)
- Eric A Miska
Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior
- Zamira G Soares
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2016, LeBoeuf et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Further reading
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- Evolutionary Biology
What is the genetic architecture of local adaptation and what is the geographic scale over which it operates? We investigated patterns of local and convergent adaptation in five sympatric population pairs of traditionally cultivated maize and its wild relative teosinte (Zea mays subsp. parviglumis). We found that signatures of local adaptation based on the inference of adaptive fixations and selective sweeps are frequently exclusive to individual populations, more so in teosinte compared to maize. However, for both maize and teosinte, selective sweeps are also frequently shared by several populations, and often between subspecies. We were further able to infer that selective sweeps were shared among populations most often via migration, though sharing via standing variation was also common. Our analyses suggest that teosinte has been a continued source of beneficial alleles for maize, even after domestication, and that maize populations have facilitated adaptation in teosinte by moving beneficial alleles across the landscape. Taken together, our results suggest local adaptation in maize and teosinte has an intermediate geographic scale, one that is larger than individual populations but smaller than the species range.