Convergent evolution of a labile nutritional symbiosis in ants
Jackson, Raphaella; Monnin, David; Patapiou, Patapios A.; Golding, Gemma; Helanterä, Heikki; Oettler, Jan; Heinze, Jürgen; Wurm, Yannick; Economou, Chloe K.; Chapuisat, Michel; Henry, Lee M. (2022-06-14)
Jackson, R., Monnin, D., Patapiou, P.A. et al. Convergent evolution of a labile nutritional symbiosis in ants. ISME J 16, 2114–2122 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-022-01256-1
© The Author(s) 2022. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
https://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi-fe2022111866205
Tiivistelmä
Abstract
Ants are among the most successful organisms on Earth. It has been suggested that forming symbioses with nutrient-supplementing microbes may have contributed to their success, by allowing ants to invade otherwise inaccessible niches. However, it is unclear whether ants have evolved symbioses repeatedly to overcome the same nutrient limitations. Here, we address this question by comparing the independently evolved symbioses in Camponotus, Plagiolepis, Formica and Cardiocondyla ants. Our analysis reveals the only metabolic function consistently retained in all of the symbiont genomes is the capacity to synthesise tyrosine. We also show that in certain multi-queen lineages that have co-diversified with their symbiont for millions of years, only a fraction of queens carry the symbiont, suggesting ants differ in their colony-level reliance on symbiont-derived resources. Our results imply that symbioses can arise to solve common problems, but hosts may differ in their dependence on symbionts, highlighting the evolutionary forces influencing the persistence of long-term endosymbiotic mutualisms.
Kokoelmat
- Avoin saatavuus [31941]