Social environment affects the transcriptomic response to bacteria in ant queens.

ABSTRACT: Social insects have evolved enormous capacities to collectively build nests and defend their colonies against both predators and pathogens. The latter is achieved by a combination of individual immune responses and sophisticated collective behavioral and organizational disease defenses, that is, social immunity. We investigated how the presence or absence of these social defense lines affects individual-level immunity in ant queens after bacterial infection. To this end, we injected queens of the ant Linepithema humile with a mix of gram+ and gram- bacteria or a control solution, reared them either with workers or alone and analyzed their gene expression patterns at 2, 4, 8, and 12 hr post-injection, using RNA-seq. This allowed us to test for the effect of bacterial infection, socia

SUBMITTER: Viljakainen L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6262927 | biostudies-literature | 2018 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature