Differential gene expression profile analysis among fungus-farming and non-fungus-farming ant species

• Grant number: 18/05718-0
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: July 12, 2018
• End date: December 11, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Genetics - Molecular Genetics and Genetics of Microorganisms
• Principal Investigator: Mauricio Bacci Junior
• Grantee: Milene Ferro
• Supervisor: Ana Victoria Conesa Cegarra
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Centro de Investigación Príncipe Felipe, Spain
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/17950-4 - Genomic evolution underlying the nutritional dependence between ants and fungi, BP.PD

Abstract

Recent work established that the fungus-farming ants (subtribe Attina) are a sister group of non-fungus-farming ants (subtribe Dacetina) and that both clades belong the Attini tribe. The first group encompasses species that maintain an obligatory mutualism with fungi for food. On the other hand, non-fungus-farming ants are specialized predators that do not cultivate fungi and with limited information in the literature. Understand the Attina sister group is important because it could provide critical information about the physiological, behavioural and ecological precursors to fungus farming. The transcription level of a gene can vary between genotypes as a heritable phenotype and this knowledge can be important because evolutionary changes noted in gene expression may precede morphological changes that support the process of speciation or specialization. In this way, we generated transcriptomes for three Attina fungus-farming ant species and two Dacetina non-fungus-farming ant species. In the present BEPE project we propose: (1) to improve the annotation for two non-fungus-farming transcriptomes; (2) to find the orthologous genes between the five species; (3) to generate the gene expression profile and (4) to compare gene expression in these distinct ant species. With this procedure, we intend to characterize the differential genes expressed between fungus-farming and non-fungus-farming ant species associating this information with the nutritional diet of the ants.