Behaviour is a key interface between an animal's genome and its environment. Repeatable individual differences in behaviour have been extensively documented in animals, but the molecular underpinnings of behavioural variation among individuals within natural populations remain largely unknown. Here, we offer a critical review of when molecular techniques may yield new insights, and we provide specific guidance on how and whether the latest tools available are appropriate given different resources, system and organismal constraints, and experimental designs. Integrating molecular genetic techniques with other strategies to study the proximal causes of behaviour provides opportunities to expand rapidly into new avenues of exploration. Such endeavours will enable us to better understand how repeatable individual differences in behaviour have evolved, how they are expressed and how they can be maintained within natural populations of animals.
BackgroundMutualistic obligate endosymbioses shape the evolution of endosymbiont genomes, but their impact on host genomes remains unclear. Insects of the sub-order Sternorrhyncha (Hemiptera) depend on bacterial endosymbionts for essential amino acids present at low abundances in their phloem-based diet. This obligate dependency has been proposed to explain why multiple amino acid transporter genes are maintained in the genomes of the insect hosts. We implemented phylogenetic comparative methods to test whether amino acid transporters have proliferated in sternorrhynchan genomes at rates grater than expected by chance.ResultsBy applying a series of methods to reconcile gene and species trees, inferring the size of gene families in ancestral lineages, and simulating the null process of birth and death in multi-gene families, we uncovered a 10-fold increase in duplication rate in the AAAP family of amino acid transporters within Sternorrhyncha. This gene family expansion was unmatched in other closely related clades lacking endosymbionts that provide essential amino acids.ConclusionsOur findings support the influence of obligate endosymbioses on host genome evolution by both inferring significant expansions of gene families involved in symbiotic interactions, and discovering increases in the rate of duplication associated with multiple emergences of obligate symbiosis in Sternorrhyncha.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12862-015-0315-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Xerolitor, a new, monotypic genus of fungus‐growing ants, is described to accommodate the phylogenetically isolated, relict species Mycetosoritis explicatus Kempf. We also diagnose the male and the larva of Xerolitor explicatus (Kempf) comb.n. and report ecological observations for the species, including nest architecture and foraging behaviour. Xerolitor explicatus comb.n. inhabits the dry habitats of the Brazilian Cerrado and the Bolivian and Paraguayan Gran Chaco. Bayesian multilocus phylogenetic analyses indicate that X. explicatus comb.n. is, contrary to some prior hypotheses, a member of the ‘higher’ fungus‐growing ants and the sister taxon of the genus Sericomyrmex Mayr. Results from phylogenetic analyses of the fungal cultivar grown by X. explicatus comb.n. in Paraguay, as well as the presence of gongylidia, indicate that the fungal mutualist is a member of the clade of higher fungal cultivar species and that it is probably the same species cultivated by some Trachymyrmex Forel and Sericomyrmex species.
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