Clonal reproduction with androgenesis and somatic

Authors: Ichiro Okita Koji Tsuchida

Publish Date: 2016/02/27

Volume: 103, Issue: 3-4, Pages: 22-

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Abstract

In haplodiploid insects such as ants male sexuals develop from unfertilised haploid eggs while female sexuals and workers develop from fertilized diploid eggs However some ant species do not exchange their gene pool between sexes both male and female sexuals are clonally produced while workers are sexually produced To date three ant species Wasmannia auropunctata Vollenhovia emeryi and Paratrechina longicornis have been reported to reproduce using such reproductive systems In this study we reveal that in one lineage of the ant Cardiocondyla kagutsuchi male and female sexuals are also clonally produced In contrast to the abovementioned three species the workers were not only sexually produced but had recombinant sequences in their nuclear internal transcribed spacer regions although the recombinant sequences were not detected in male or female sexuals These results suggest that the lineage likely possesses a mechanism to compensate for the reduction in genetic variation due to clonal reproduction with somatic recombination that occurs within the workersWe thank Dr N Ito for his assistance with colony hybridisation Dr A Tanabe for his advice on our phylogenetic analyses Drs H Suga and T Yabe for valuable discussion regarding mitotic recombination and Drs M Okuno and K Yokoi for their helpful suggestions on our study We thank two anonymous referees for valuable comments on the manuscript This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI grant number 26650162

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