Project description:We generated snRNA-Seq for olfactory sensory neurons from late stage pupae of the clonal raider ant to study the chemosensory gene expression during development.
Project description:This experiment aimed at determining the immediate (d1) transcriptional consequences of knockding down the corazonin receptor in the ant brain.
Project description:We performed bulk RNA-seq analysis of antennae from three notable pest ant species, Camponotus floridanus, Atta sexdens, and Atta cephalotes, in order to characterize caste-specific expression patterns of odorant receptor genes.
Project description:Mass spectrometry imaging is a powerful analytical technique for detecting and determining spatial distributions of molecules within a sample. Typically, mass spectrometry imaging is limited to the analysis of thin tissue sections taken from the middle of a sample. In this work, we present a mass spectrometry imaging method for the detection of compounds produced by bacteria on the outside surface of ant exoskeletons in response to pathogen exposure. Fungus-growing ants have a specialized mutualism with Pseudonocardia, a bacterium that lives on the ants’ exoskeletons and helps protect their fungal garden food source from harmful pathogens. The developed method allows for visualization of bacterial-derived compounds on the ant exoskeleton. This method demonstrates the capability to detect compounds that are specifically localized to the bacterial patch on ant exoskeletons, shows good reproducibility across individual ants, and achieves accurate mass measurements within 5 ppm error when using a high-resolution, accurate-mass mass spectrometer.
Project description:Ants are among the most successful animals on earth, with societies of a complexity that rivals our own. These societies are characterized by reproductive division of labor between female queens that can live several years and lay thousands of eggs per day, workers that live only a few months and are sterile, and males that live only a few weeks and do not participate in colony tasks. These striking differences in lifespan and roles are echoed by extensive morphological and physiological divergence. Using the fire ant, Solenopsis invicta, we conduct the first genome-wide survey of developmental gene expression levels over 20 time-points from larval to adult stages in workers, queens and males
