CareKill · To Care Or To Kill: When The Needs Of The Many Outweigh The Needs Of The Few.
Horizon Europe — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2022-10-01 → 2024-09-30
- EU contribution
- €214,934
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
To Care Or To Kill: When The Needs Of The Many Outweigh The Needs Of The Few.
Social living among animals, while advantageous for survival and cooperation, inherently increases the risk of disease transmission, as evidenced by pandemics like SARS-CoV-2. This challenge is acute in social insects such as termites, which live in densely populated colonies with low genetic diversity, often in pathogen-rich environments like soil and decaying wood. Despite these vulnerabilities, termites demonstrate remarkable resilience to disease, employing sophisticated "social immunity" strategies to mitigate outbreaks within their colonies. These strategies include behavioral adaptations such as grooming and isolation of infected individuals, as well as chemical and immune responses. A key component of this immunity is the behavioral dichotomy to either care or kill infected nestmates, balancing the preservation of worker resources against the prevention of pathogen spread. However, the factors driving this decision—such as pathogen dose, infection progression, and genetic influences—remain poorly understood. Moreover, the potential role of immune and behavioral memory in shaping these decisions is largely unexplored. Overall Objectives 1. Behavioral Dynamics: How infection dose and progression influence the care-kill switch in social termites. 2. Genetic and Molecular Mechanisms: What genes and pathways govern the assessment of risk and the resulting care or kill behavior. 3. Memory and Adaptation: How previous encounters with pathogens influence subsequent care-kill decisions, exploring the existence of social immune memory. Through behavioral experiments, advanced genomic analyses, and collaboration with global experts, CareKill will generate a comprehensive model of termite social immunity. By integrating findings from ecology, molecular biology, and behavior, the project will offer fundamental insights into adaptive disease management strategies in social animals. Pathway to Impact Scientific Advancements: Establishing a robust framework for understanding social immunity, which has implications for ecological immunology, behavioral ecology, and public health analogies. CareKill will also fill gaps in the understanding of termite resilience in high-pathogen environments. Conservation and Management: Providing knowledge that can inform the preservation of termite species, essential for soil health and ecological balance. Broader Applications: Insights into adaptive collective immunity could inspire innovative approaches in human disease management and bio-inspired technologies. This work aligns with global priorities in biodiversity, ecosystem health, and sustainable living. Its findings may have strategic relevance for addressing the challenges of disease spread in social systems, both natural and human-made.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
As epitomized by epidemics and pandemics throughout human history, including the ongoing SARS CoV-2 pandemic, social life carries risks of substantial and rapid spread of infectious diseases. Termites living in pathogen-rich environments have evolved remarkably robust social immunity mitigation strategies that effectively prevent diseases from spreading within colonies. Individual termites carefully balance whether to care for a sick nestmate and save the colony worker resources, or kill the sick nestmate to remove the risk of an infection spreading. The behavioural and immunological factors driving this dichotomy remain obscure. The CareKill action will close major gaps in our understanding the role of pathogen dose and infection stage in governing the switch from care to kill, what genes are involved in decision-making (immune pathways, neural networks, genes involved in stress), and how behavioural and immune memory impact care-kill decision making during subsequent encounters with sick nestmates. The action will capitalise on my extensive background in behavioural ecology and social immunity in termites, and integrate state-of-the-art pathogen load quantification and global gene expression analyses on actively caretaking or killing focal termites to establish if social immune memory is key to effective long-term reduction of disease risks. In doing so, this work explores novel concepts and hypotheses to close important gaps in our understanding of social immunity. CareKill will benefit from synergies of ongoing chemical ecology research in the focal termite species by my host, Michael Poulsen (University of Copenhagen), who will provide training in combining molecular techniques and termite ecology. CareKill will provide fundamental novel insights into the adaptive value of mitigation strategies that are essential to curb the spread of diseases and that allow for long-lived animal societies to sustain in the face of pathogenic threats.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- KOBENHAVNS UNIVERSITET · KOBENHAVNCoordinatorDenmark
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union