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Evolutionarily Advanced Ant Farmers Rear Polyploid Fungal Crops

Summary

This research revealed how farming ants have domesticated fungi over millions of years, leading to genetic changes that made the fungi better suited for large-scale agriculture. Similar to how humans have bred more productive crop plants, these ants have influenced their fungal crops to become more efficient at producing food for their colonies. Impacts on everyday life: – Provides insights into how organisms can be domesticated for improved agricultural productivity – Demonstrates parallel evolution between human and ant agriculture systems – Helps understand how genetic complexity can be beneficial for crop production – Shows how long-term partnerships between species can lead to mutual adaptations – Offers lessons for developing more resilient agricultural systems

Background

Innovative evolutionary developments are often related to gene or genome duplications. The crop fungi of attine fungus-growing ants were suspected to have enhanced genetic variation reminiscent of polyploidy, but this had never been quantified with cytological data and genetic markers.

Objective

To estimate the number of nuclei per fungal cell for 42 symbionts reared by 14 species of Panamanian fungus-growing ants and investigate how putative higher genetic diversity is distributed across polykaryotic mycelia.

Results

Domesticated symbionts of higher attine ants were found to be polykaryotic with 7-17 nuclei per cell, whereas nonspecialized crops of lower attines were dikaryotic similar to most free-living basidiomycete fungi. Genetic variation in polykaryotic symbionts of basal higher attine genera Trachymyrmex and Sericomyrmex was only slightly enhanced, but the evolutionarily derived crop fungi of Atta and Acromyrmex leaf-cutting ants had much higher genetic variation, with approximately 5-7 haplotypes on average.

Conclusion

The study revealed that leaf-cutting ant symbionts are highly and obligatorily polyploid while the symbionts of other higher attines are lowly and facultatively polyploid. This stepwise transition appears analogous to ploidy variation in plants and fungi domesticated by humans and in fungi domesticated by termites and plants, where gene or genome duplications were typically associated with selection for higher productivity, but allopolyploid chimerism was incompatible with sexual reproduction.
  • Published in:Journal of Evolutionary Biology,
  • Study Type:Laboratory Research,
  • Source: 10.1111/jeb.12718
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