Nutrient flows in ant colonies

Many insect orders, and most ant species, exhibit eusocial behavior, i.e., individuals live in groups, coordinated through cooperative action and reproductive division of labor. One of manifestations of eusociality is presence of socially exchanged fluids. The exchange of nutritious fluids, also called trophallaxis, transmits nutrients among the castes, and thus is at the heart of maintaining the colony. The composition of trophallactic fluids can also vary among different castes: for example, the pupal molting fluid of clonal raider ant Ooceraea biroi are rich in free amino acids, among other metabolites. The exchange of readily available molecular building blocks (biomass precursors) opens opportunities for distributing the metabolic labor among colony members: different individuals could specialize in production of compounds for the whole colony. However, both biosynthesis of biomass precursors in situ, and production of them to be shared, come with distinct investments and benefits.

Together with the Social Fluids Lab at the Universities of Fribourg (CH) and Cambridge (UK), and the team of Brian Fisher (California Academy of Sciences/Madagascar Biodiversity Center) we are currently running a Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Organization-funded grant on the metabolic division of labor in Dracula ants. The Draculas (Stigmatomma sp.) are only one species under our radar: we aim to comprehensively characterize the qualitative and quantitative nature of ant nutritional exchanges across different ant clades. I have a stake in different sub-projects of this rather big (for a completely basic science project…) effort, and the grant is a perfect playground to test the transferability of our expertise in using genome-scale metabolic models (GEMs). I will participate in multi-layer -omics data analysis and perform all the modeling activities to explore the diversity of metabolic networks in ant species, how these networks change during ant development, and hope to gain a better understanding on how nutritional interactions actually shape the colony structure.

This is all actively in progress, so stay tuned!