Researchers compared 163 ant genomes and reconstructed ancient bursts of mobile DNA activity, finding links with the later growth of major ant groups into thousands of species.
Researchers comparing the genomes of 163 ant species found that groups with more “jumping genes”—DNA segments that can move and copy themselves—also tended to have more species today. The study, described in ScienceDaily, offers a possible genetic explanation for ants’ diversification, rather than proof that these DNA segments caused it.
Lukas Schrader of the University of Münster’s Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity led the international study, published in Science Advances. Ants now comprise more than 15,000 species worldwide, making them the largest family of social insects.
Jumping genes, formally called transposable elements, can move to different places within a genome—an organism’s genetic material—and produce additional copies of themselves. That activity can create genetic variation on which evolution can act.
Scientists once viewed these elements mainly as genetic parasites because they can multiply without clearly benefiting their host, and their activity can sometimes contribute to disease. The ant study instead examines how they may also have contributed to evolutionary change.
The sampled ants represented 12 of the 16 surviving subfamilies. By comparing their genomes, the researchers reconstructed changes in transposable-element activity over the past 100 million years.
About 66 million years ago, an asteroid impact and the mass extinction that followed created opportunities for surviving animals to evolve and spread. The team’s reconstruction placed separate bursts of jumping-gene activity in several major ant lineages in the early Paleogene, around that time. Those inferred bursts preceded the lineages’ expansion into thousands of species.
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Schrader interprets transposable elements as a genetic mechanism connecting the environmental upheaval with ants’ later diversification. The reconstructed sequence establishes a historical association; it does not establish that the asteroid activated the elements or that their activity caused new species to form.
The researchers also found an association between jumping genes and the expansion of gene families involved in chemical communication, especially odorant-receptor genes. Odorant receptors detect smells. Ants use chemical signals to navigate, recognize members of their colony and coordinate activities.
The team suggests that jumping genes may have helped expand these sensory systems, potentially improving ants’ ability to detect and interpret chemical messages. Improved smell and communication remain proposed consequences of the genomic association, rather than demonstrated outcomes.
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