TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kohlmeier, Philip
A1  - Feldmeyer, Barbara
A1  - Foitzik, Susanne
T1  - Vitellogenin-like A–associated shifts in social cue responsiveness regulate behavioral task specialization in an ant
T2  - PLoS biology
N2  - Division of labor and task specialization explain the success of human and insect societies. Social insect colonies are characterized by division of labor, with workers specializing in brood care early and foraging later in life. Theory posits that this task switching requires shifts in responsiveness to task-related cues, yet experimental evidence is weak. Here, we show that a Vitellogenin (Vg) ortholog identified in an RNAseq study on the ant T. longispinosus is involved in this process: using phylogenetic analyses of Vg and Vg-like genes, we firstly show that this candidate gene does not cluster with the intensively studied honey bee Vg but falls into a separate Vg-like A cluster. Secondly, an experimental knockdown of Vg-like A in the fat body caused a reduction in brood care and an increase in nestmate care in young ant workers. Nestmate care is normally exhibited by older workers. We demonstrate experimentally that this task switch is at least partly based on Vg-like A–associated shifts in responsiveness from brood to worker cues. We thus reveal a novel mechanism leading to early behavioral maturation via changes in social cue responsiveness mediated by Vg-like A and associated pathways, which proximately play a role in regulating division of labor.
KW  - Social systems
KW  - Ants
KW  - Foraging
KW  - Animal sociality
KW  - Gene expression
KW  - Insects
KW  - Fats
KW  - Honey bees
Y1  - 2018
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/46596
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-465964
SN  - 1545-7885
SN  - 1544-9173
N1  - Copyright: © 2018 Kohlmeier et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
VL  - 16
IS  - (6): e2005747
SP  - 1
EP  - 26
PB  - PLoS
CY  - Lawrence, KS
ER  -