MutANTs · Mutation rate evolution in attine ants
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2020-09-01 → 2022-08-31
- EU contribution
- €219,312
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Mutation rate evolution in attine ants
Germline mutations (GMs, heritable DNA alterations in germ cells) are the driving force behind evolution, so the rate at which these changes in ‘genetic blueprints’ arise (germline mutation rate, GMR) is a fundamental question relevant for all biology. GMR varies across species. On one hand, GMs are the primary source of genetic diversity, because they create new variation in the gene pool and increase the potential for novel phenotypic traits that natural selection can work on; this implies that a non-zero GMR is essential for the survival of populations in a perpetually changing environment. On the other hand, because most mutations are deleterious, GMR is most likely to cause genome instability and decreased fitness if not sterility or lethality, so that GMR is likely to be under balancing selection with responses to selection depending on lineage-specific genome architecture and environmental conditions affecting life-history adaptations and population sizes. GMR also varies within species. In particular, GMR is expected to increase with parental age, because the strength of selection on GMR is inevitably relaxed with advancing age and deleterious mutations expressed late in life fail to be purged. Understanding how natural selection may affect evolutionary change in GMR across species and how the strength of selection on GMR changes with parental age is a general question of huge importance and highly relevant for the pressing need to understand disease vulnerability in aging human populations and problems of genetic load when designing long-term prognoses in conservation biology. MutANTs proposed to identify the evolutionary forces driving the variation in germline mutation rate within and across species. To achieve this goal, MutANTs had two scientific Objectives (Obs.): Ob. 1 - To develop the first model of maternal age-dependent germline mutation rate (GMR) using whole-genome re-sequencing data from a 14-year collection of mother-sons samples of the CSE laboratory attine ant species Acromyrmex echinatior; and Ob. 2 - To develop the first comprehensive understanding of phylogenetically GMR evolution as a function of maximal life-span of queens, mean mature colony size, social system, and Ne - adjusted for phylogenetic ancestry - capturing the key characteristics of comparative attine life-history, based on mother-offspring whole-genome re-sequencing data from 12 attine species and 9 outgroup ant species.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Germline mutation rate (GMR) is a key concept in all disciplines of biology, and particularly in evolutionary biology and the biomedical sciences. GMR varies both across and within species, but what drives this variation is unclear. Theories predict that GMR variation is shaped by environmental selection pressures, by effective population sizes, and by prevailing life-history traits (across species) and parental age at reproduction (within species). However, our understanding is extremely limited because within-species GMR variation has been investigated only to some extent in humans, and larger comparative genome-level datasets in other clades have not yet been pursued.I propose to start filling this gap by studying GMR in attine fungus-growing ants and a set of outgroup. non-attine ants. The attine ants, a ca. 55 MY old monophyletic lineage, are ideal for understanding GMR variation across and within species because their basic ecology is similar (obligate dependence of farmed fungi for food) but their life-histories diversified enormously from the base to the crown of their phylogenetic tree, which presently has 15 recognized genus-level branches and >230 species. Against a background dataset of ~20 high quality genomes, I propose to obtain genome-wide GMR estimates for 12 attine ants and 7 non-attine ants while controlling for confounders of phylogeny, colony size, life-span and effective population size. In addition, I will do an in-depth analysis of a single leafcutter ant species with long-lived queens and stored sperm of the same age, where I can also control for parental age. I will implement the MutANTs project at the Centre for Social Evolution in Copenhagen, an internationally renowned research hub for interdisciplinary omics research on ants, with Professors Guojie Zhang and Jacobus Jan Boomsma as joint hosts. I expect that in the two years available MutANTs will yield the first comparative data to predict GMRs across and within species.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union