Data from: A caste differentiation mutant elucidates the evolution of socially parasitic ants
Data files
Feb 22, 2023 version files 923.23 MB
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assembly_QLM.fasta
219 MB
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assembly_WT.fasta
277.55 MB
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primary_chroms_ragoo.fasta
213.80 MB
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README.MD
787 B
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secondary_chroms_ragoo.fasta
212.89 MB
Abstract
Most ant species have two distinct female castes – queens and workers – yet the developmental and genetic mechanisms that produce these alternative phenotypes remain poorly understood. Working with the clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, we discovered a variant strain that expresses queen-like traits in individuals that would normally become workers. The variants show changes in morphology, behavior, and fitness that cause them to rely on workers in wild-type (WT) colonies for survival. Overall, they resemble the queens of many obligately parasitic ants that have evolutionarily lost the worker caste and live inside colonies of closely related hosts.
To understand the genetic basis of this variant strain, which we term the queen-like mutants (QLM), we re-analyzed published PacBio and Hi-C data (McKenzie and Kronauer 2018) using the Falcon pipeline.
Next, we performed high molecular weight extractions of O. biroi following a published protocol and sequenced two barcoded libraries using the Oxford Nanopore PromethION platform. Raw reads were assembled de novo using Flye (version 2.8.2) and aligned to the Obir v5.6 contigs using Mauve (snapshot 2015-02-25). These de novo assemblies were uploaded as assembly_QLM.fasta and assembly_WT.fasta, respectively.
For more details, see Trible et al 2023, Current Biology.
The falcon pipeline (falcon-unzip and falcon-phase) and RaGOO were used to generate the primary and secondary 5.6 assemblies. RaGOO also generated structural variant statistics. Contigs from the de-novo Flye assemblies were aligned to the primary RaGOO assembly using Mauve.