Qiye Li, Mingyue Wang, Pei Zhang, Yang Liu, Qunfei Guo, Yuanzhen Zhu, Tinggang Wen, Xueqin Dai, Xiafang Zhang, Manuel Nagel, Bjarke Hamberg Dethlefsen, Nianxia Xie, Jie Zhao, Wei Jiang, Lei Han, Liang Wu, Wenjiang Zhong, Zhifeng Wang, Xiaoyu Wei, Wei Dai, Longqi Liu, Xun Xu, Haorong Lu, Huanming Yang, Jian Wang, Jacobus J Boomsma, Chuanyu Liu, Guojie Zhang, Weiwei Liu
Ant colonies with permanent division of labour between castes and highly distinct roles of the sexes have been conceptualized to be superorganisms, but the cellular and molecular mechanisms that mediate caste/sex-specific behavioural specialization have remained obscure. Here we characterized the brain cell repertoire of queens, gynes (virgin queens), workers and males of Monomorium pharaonis by obtaining 206,367 single-nucleus transcriptomes. In contrast to Drosophila, the mushroom body Kenyon cells are abundant in ants and display a high diversity with most subtypes being enriched in worker brains, the evolutionarily derived caste...
August 2022: Nature Ecology & Evolution