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Ant Behavior Significantly Altered By Injecting a Single Enzyme (arstechnica.com)
New submitter Fiona_OHanlon writes: According to an article at Ars Technica, researchers injected enzymes into ant larvae brains, causing genetically identical ants from different castes to behave as if they were from the opposite caste. From the story: "Carpenter ants live in a caste system, where some members of the colony grow into large, strong worker guards known as majors and others grow into small, inquisitive food scouts known as minors. [The researchers] focused specifically on enzymes that affect 160 genes whose activity diverged the most between minors and majors. Those genes included ones associated with learning, memory, and the way neurons communicate with each other in the brain. ... After several experiments with feeding the substance to their insect subjects, the researchers figured out how to inject the enzymes into the brains of major workers shortly after hatching (abstract). The treatment made the ants take on new social roles immediately. ... The modification ultimately depended on changing the behavior of one particular gene, Rpd3, which set off a cascade effect that changed the behavior of other genes too."
that I would just love to test this stuff upon.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
We have been medicating human behavior deemed antisocial for generations now...
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I'm pretty sure that alcohol has a similar effect on humans, albeit temporarily.
How is it that there hasn't yet been a single "I for one welcome our new insect overlords" post? Is this not Slashdot?
Shiny New Australia.
Here's the real surprise - /. headline dumbs down scientific discovery to the point that idiot AC might click on it, and idiot AC claims the science was obvious all along. You didn't read the journal article, did you AC?
These "scientists" should inject enzymes into their own brains.
Simple smell can do it as well.
Scouts have the least nest-smell so if foragers (which have a bit more nest-smell), don't smell ants like that for some time, they are going to scout themselves.
Just as the cleaners around the nest entrance are going foraging themselves if they don't smell as many foragers coming back or the 1/3 'reserve' inside the nest if they don't smell as many cleaners coming in are going to go out and doing some cleaning themselves.
It's self-organizing, they found that out years ago when methods became available to mark single ants to see what each of them does.
This is how my boss is going to force me to become an Oracle DBA.
Rpd3 is a histone deacetylase, for those who want intelligent discussion, rather than paranoid rambling.
For those who aren't up to speed on HDACs, eukariotic (which includes all multicellular organisms) genomes are folded up in the nucleus, wrapped in coils around protein complexes called "histones". As DNA has phosphate groups (the "acid" part in "deoxyribonucleic acid"), in order to wrap up the DNA compactly, these proteins need to neutralize the negative charges on the phosphate groups, which they do with positively charged lysine sidechains. But the cell can regulate how efficiently that wrapping goes by adding/removing an acetyl group to the lysines with histone acetyltransferases (HATs) and histone deacetylases (HDACs). Eukaryotes use this wrapping/unwrapping to help control gene expression: genes need to be unwrapped in order to be expressed. Normally, gene activation involves things like HDAC recruitment to remove histones from the gene in order to help unwrap the DNA and start expression.
So what's happening here is that they inject a whole bunch of this histone deacetylase into the ants' brains, which then presumably gets into the nucleus (which is actually the most interesting part, from my perspective), and rips off the acetyl groups from the histones surrounding certain genes, leading to their expression. Apparently, the Rpd3 HDAC has a location of action which specifically rips off the acetyl groups from around those genes which are involved in changing the ants' brain into a forager. (It's probably not all that precise, but it's just that Rpd3 has an activity profile which is biased toward those genes - it hits a bunch of stuff, but that's the major locations which show the biggest effect.) It could very well be that Rpd3 is one of the "master regulator switches" in ants which gets turned on in development for making foragers.
From a certain perspective, it's not all that surprising. We know that both types of ants have basically the same DNA and the same genes. The only difference between worker and guard is the gene expression profile, and sequestering unused genes in condensed chromatin (basically tightly-wrapped histones) is the best way we know about for long-term gene inactivation, short of actual DNA editing. So it makes sense that the developmental process which makes one ant a forager and one a guard involves wrapping one section or the other up in histones. Inject this HDAC into the brain, and you unwrap those sections for forager behavior. It's basically the equivalent of giving massive amounts of testosterone/estrogen to humans to perform a sex change - certain developmental features are already locked in, but injecting the hormone/HDAC changed the gene expression pattern and subsequent behavior of the individual.
would be good to see
... it does wonders for altering one's behavior.
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"And may your days be long upon the earth."
It's amazing that scientists can alter or destroy life.
They seem unable to create life from a chemical soup, or restore life after death. Why do you think that is?
{sarcasm} Feed the children (under the age of 6) of wealthy, upper class intelligentsia lead at a young age and they act like the children of poor, lower class, crime families. {/sarcasm}
Human minds are complex and general machines, as opposed to the more specific brains used by other creatures. One of the main features of a working human brain is that it can route around simple issues - if it is working right. It's why we are not controlled by scent/phermones the way certain other life forms are.
All this just for a live-action version of Antz. Woody Allen could not be reached for a comment.
He effected a bored affect.