Project description:We report the discovery of Nylanderia fulva virus 1 (NfV-1), the first virus identified and characterized from the ant, Nylanderia fulva. The NfV-1 genome (GenBank accession KX024775) is 10,881 nucleotides in length, encoding one large open reading frame (ORF). Helicase, protease, RNA-dependent RNA polymerase, and jelly-roll capsid protein domains were recognized within the polyprotein. Phylogenetic analysis placed NfV-1 in an unclassified clade of viruses. Electron microscopic examination of negatively stained samples revealed particles with icosahedral symmetry with a diameter of 28.7±1.1nm. The virus was detected by RT-PCR in larval, pupal, worker and queen developmental stages. However, the replicative strand of NfV-1 was only detected in larvae. Vertical transmission did not appear to occur, but horizontal transmission was facile. The inter-colonial field prevalence of NfV-1 was 52±35% with some local infections reaching 100%. NfV-1 was not detected in limited samples of other Nylanderia species or closely related ant species.
Project description:In ants, social parasitism is an umbrella term describing a variety of life-history strategies, where a parasitic species depends entirely on a free-living species, for part of or its entire life-cycle, for either colony founding, survival, and/or reproduction. The highly specialized inquiline social parasites are fully dependent on their hosts for their entire lifecycles. Most inquiline species are tolerant of the host queen in the parasitized colony, forgo producing a worker caste, and invest solely in the production of sexual offspring. In general, inquilines are rare, and their geographic distribution is limited, making it difficult to study them. Inquiline populations appear to be small, cryptic, and they are perhaps ephemeral. Thus, information about their natural history is often fragmentary or non-existent but is necessary for understanding the socially parasitic life history syndrome in more detail. Here, we describe two new species of inquiline social parasites, Nylanderia deyrupi sp. nov. and Nylanderia parasitica sp. nov., from the southeastern United States, parasitizing Nylanderia wojciki and Nylanderia faisonensis, respectively. The formicine genus Nylanderia is large and globally distributed, but until the recent description of Nylanderia deceptrix, social parasites were unknown from this genus. In addition to describing the new social parasite species, we summarize the fragmentary information known about their biology, present a key to both the queens and the males of the Nylanderia social parasites, and discuss the morphology of the social parasites in the context of the inquiline syndrome.
Project description:Nylanderia flavipes (Smith, 1874) is a Formicine ant found in East Asia. We have completed mitochondrial genome of N. flavipes of which length is 16,687 bp including 13 protein-coding genes, 2 ribosomal RNA genes, 22 transfer RNAs, and a control region. The base composition was AT-biased (GC ratio is 18.9%). Gene order of N. flavipes presents a unique inversion of trnP in comparison to Camponotus species. Our phylogenetic trees together with phylogenomic analysis suggest that the gene order rearrangements occurred independently in Camponotus and N. flavipes.
Project description:Co-expression networks and gene regulatory networks (GRNs) are emerging as important tools for predicting the functional roles of individual genes at a system-wide scale. To enable network reconstructions we built a large-scale gene expression atlas comprised of 62,547 mRNAs, 17,862 non-modified proteins, and 6,227 phosphoproteins harboring 31,595 phosphorylation sites quantified across maize development. There was little edge conservation in co-expression and GRNs reconstructed using transcriptome versus proteome data yet networks from either data type were enriched in ontological categories and effective in predicting known regulatory relationships. This integrated gene expression atlas provides a valuable community resource. The networks should facilitate plant biology research and they provide a conceptual framework for future systems biology studies highlighting the importance of studying gene regulation at several levels.