Reprogramming ant ‘soldiers’ – Penn: Office of University Communications

Through early adulthood, exposure to new experienceslike learning to drive a car or memorizing information for an examtriggers change in the human brain, re-wiring neural pathways to imprint memories and modify behavior. Similar to humans, the behavior of Florida carpenter ants is not set in stonetheir roles, whether it is protecting the colony or foraging for food, are determined by signals from the physical and social environment early in their life. But questions remain about how long they are vulnerable to epigenetic changes and what pathways govern social behavior in ants.

Now, a team led by researchers in thePerelman School of Medicine discovered that a protein called CoREST, a neural repressor that is also found in humans, plays a central role in determining the social behavior of ants. The results, published inMolecular Cell, also revealed that worker ants called Majors, known as brawny soldiers that protect colonies, can be reprogrammed to perform the foraging rolegenerally reserved for their sisters, the Minor antsup to five days after they emerge as an adult ant. However, the reprogramming is ineffective at the 10-day mark, revealing how narrow the window of epigenetic plasticity is in ants.

How behavior becomes established in humans is deeply fascinatingwe know its quite plastic especially during childhood and early adolescencehowever, of course, we cannot study or manipulate this experimentally, saysthe studys senior authorShelley Berger, the Daniel S. Och University Professor in the departments of Cell and Developmental Biology and Biology, and director of the Penn Epigenetics Institute. Ants, with their complex societies and behavior, and similar plasticity, provide a wonderful laboratory model to understand the underlying mechanisms and pathways."

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Reprogramming ant 'soldiers' - Penn: Office of University Communications