ANT-GUT SYMBIONTS · Biodiversity of endosymbiotic microbial communities and their role in food webs involving tropical arboreal ants
FP6 — Marie Curie Actions (Human Resources and Mobility)
- Duration
- 2005-11-01 → 2007-10-31
- EU contribution
- €150,237
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- EIF
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners. CORDIS does not always give exact coordinates for projects before 2014. These points are placed at city or country level.
Project objective
Nutritional mutualisms between tropical arboreal ants and bacteria symbiotic in their guts are of great ecological significance, because they form an essential part of the web of interactions that underpin the keystone role of ants as predators of arthropods in tropical forest canopies. With the exception of a few highly specialised examples, these important symbioses are virtually unstudied. Plant/ant/bacterial symbioses are convenient model systems for investigating numerous open questions about symbioses between insects and bacteria. Diets of tropical plant-associated ants, for example, are often highly variable among closely related species, and even, in a system to be examined in detail in this study, among colonies in a single population.They thus offer greater scope for studying questions about functional diversity in insect/bacterial symbioses than do systems such as the interactions between Buchnera and aphids all of which arephloem-sucking insects" that have provided the foundation from which the exploration of diversity can now begin. Study of plant/ant/bacterial symbioses may elucidate new roles for bacteria and new mechanisms for their effects.The immediate goal of the study proposed here is to characterise patterns of bacterial diversity in ant guts at different levels, from intra-population variation in the African plant-ant Aphomomyrmex(mediated by the identity of yet another partner in the interaction, homopterans), to inter-population and inter specific variation in Aphomomyrmex and its sister taxon Petal omyrmex, and finally to a comparative study of bacterial symbionts of the pantropical lineage to which these ants belong, the formicine tribe Myrmelachistini. Patterns in this diversity will provide clues about the functioning and the evolutionary history of ant/bacterial symbioses. The long-term goal is to characterise functional diversity in these symbioses."
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- CENTRE NATIONAL DE LA RECHERCHE SCIENTIFIQUE - DELEGATION LANGUEDOC-ROUSSILLON · MONTPELLIERCoordinatorCity levelFrance
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union