NEW YORK, 14 August (BelTA - Xinhua) - A new study by U.S. researchers finds ants engineered to lack a gene that enables their "sense of smell" will lose the abilities to communicate, forage or compete to be a queen in their colony.
Without the "sense of smell," female ants wander off on their own, bring no food back to the nest, and fail to mate. These mutant insects live lives seemingly separate from their social fellows, said the study.
The study, published in the journal Cell last week, was led by researchers from New York University (NYU), Arizona State University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Vanderbilt University.
"We found that a species of ant may be the first model to enable in-depth functional analysis of genes that regulate social interaction in a complex society," said corresponding study author Danny Reinberg at NYU, as well as an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The research was based on the fact that ants communicate through pheromones, secreted chemicals that trigger responses.
Past studies had shown that both the right odorant receptor protein and a shared, common partner protein called Orco must be present for any pheromone to be processed in an ant's brain.
The current team successfully engineered the genetic loss of Orco protein, which made ants unable to perform some, if not all, pheromone-based social interactions.
Specifically, the mutant ants spent much of their time wandering out of the nest. They failed to interact with other members of the colony, and were unable to forage.
Furthermore, mutant females are unable to go on to produce progeny, which is essential for colony survival.
The current research focused on the Indian jumping ant, Harpegnathos saltator, which is unlike many other ant species, in which the queen is the only female that can lay eggs. In the nest of Harpegnathos saltator, any female adult worker can be converted into a "pseudo-queen" after the removal of the queen.
This is because the queen secretes a pheromone that suppresses workers' ability to mate. If the queen is removed, the most aggressive females can lay eggs after winning a series of antenna duels.
Without Orco gene, the females cannot process pheromones, which makes them much less likely to engage in dueling, the study reported.
