Romiguier Lab

Research focus

ERC Starting Grant · 2020

Evolutionary genomics of royalty in Messor hybridogenetic ants

Royalty in social insects is typically environmentally acquired rather than genetically determined. However, this is not the case in an exceptional reproductive system, known as social hybridogenesis. Here, two distinct royal lineages of ants can only produce queens by their own while they need to hybridize to produce workers. Eggs with a pure royal genome are thus genetically fated to become queens while hybrid genomes are fated to become workers. Convergent evolution toward such a baroque reproductive strategy appears common in harvester ant species (four times in Pogonomyrmex and Messor genera), but its origin is still completely mysterious. In this project, I plan to unravel the…

From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.