From glow - in - the - grim pot to spider goats , researchers have been able-bodied to attain some telling effort through genetical technology . With the advancement of engineering science rocket in recent years , change other organisms ’ DNA has never been easier . Yet , peculiarly , there is one animal that has evaded the tinkering of scientists : the pismire . Until now .
The main proceeds revolve around their sociality . Ant nut are implausibly hard to raise without the aid of worker pismire , entail that in the science lab it is tough to get genetically edited bollock to survive . Not only that , but because most species go around around a single female queen who does all the egg laying , coupled with their complicated lifecycle and genetic science , creating a colony with a big number of ants is long and extend . While strains of transgenic black eye can be explicate within calendar month , it can take years to achieve this with pismire .
But there is a species of ant that seems advanced for genetic modification . The rather brilliantly named clonal spoiler ants are peculiar within the ant world in that there is no point faggot within the colony . Each ant is allow to lie their own unfertilized orchis , which then think up as gross clones of their mothers . This mean the team could let the ants lay eggs , then shoot them with edited DNA .
Using CRISPR , now fairly commonplace among geneticist out there , the researcher target a particular gene involve in the olfactory , or smelling , scheme of the ants . Their results are published inbioRxiv . While other being , such as fruit flies , only have around 46 odorant receptor , clonal raider pismire have an telling 350 . The team suspect that this might imply that smell is vital to the sociality of the ant , and want to see what would happen if they disrupted it .
This is now oneof a few papersto have amount out of The Rockefeller University research laboratory using transgenic emmet as model . It is hoped that the information gained by these experiment could help further our understanding of sociality .
[ H / T : Science Mag ]
