181110 Germ-Band Development and Embryogenesis Rate in Atta texana

Title:
Germ-Band Development and Embryogenesis Rate in Atta texana

Speaker:
方棋羣 (Chi-Chun Fang), PhD candidate, UT Austin

Time:
請注意：本週起，北美地區日光節約時間結束，與台灣時差增加 1 小時

11/10 (Sat.) 6 pm PST, 7 pm MST, 8 pm CST, 9 pm EST
11/11 (Sun.) 10 am Taiwan

Keywords:
Evolutionary biology, Ecology, Leafcutter ant, Myrmicinae, Fungus, Symbiosis

  為配合本研究發表時程，本次錄影將延遲上傳

Abstract:

Ants (Formicidae, Hymenoptera) are useful model systems for ecological, behavioral, and evolutionary studies due to their complex social structures. However, the developmental biology of ant embryos has been neglected. Unlike Drosophila or well-studied Hymenopteran species (Apis, Nasonia) whose embryogenesis had been characterized and which undergo long germ-band development, we observed several characteristics of short/intermediate germ-band development in the ant Atta texana by examining expression of the segment polarity gene wingless (wg). We discovered that wg signals were sequentially expressed in developing segments during embryogenesis. We confirmed for A. texana the well-known phenomenon that broods from foundresses develop at a faster rate than the broods from mature colonies. This posed the question of whether growth was accelerated across all of the development stages, or was it focused at a particular stage. During the egg-stage in Atta, we observed that growth acceleration occurs during the elongation and segmentation phases of embryogenesis. The accelerated phases effectively accelerate egg development by around 25% compared to eggs from mature Atta colonies. These findings suggest future studies examining the biochemical and genetic factors underlying this rapid embryogenesis.