# The Molecular Basis of Caste Development and Evolution in Ants

> **NIH NIH DP5** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY · 2021 · $422,500

## Abstract

PROJECT ABSTRACT
The effects of genetic elements on human health are highly dependent both on other
genes in the genome as well as external environmental influences. Understanding how
functional biological systems arise from the integration of environmental and genetic
information is a central research challenge that has implications for medicine,
agriculture, and the response of our global ecology to a changing environment. In ants,
environmental signals, including social interactions and nutrition, cause developing
larvae to differentiate into distinct morphological castes as adults. These individuals
cooperate to form a coherent social unit, analogous to the epigenetic processes of cell
differentiation and cell signaling that underpin the development of unitary organisms.
Caste development in ants provides an opportunity to understand how environmental
information can induce alternative genetic programs at the level of an entire animal.
Furthermore, the study of castes will allow us to understand how heterogeneous groups
of individuals cooperate to produce functional collective behaviors, and the way that
these groups can evolve. All of these topics are directly relevant to the genetic and
cellular basis of human physiology and could greatly improve our understanding of
human health.
To identify and characterize the core mechanisms of caste development in ants, this
proposal presents an integrative research program that spans multiple scales of
biological organization: 1) The use of functional genetic manipulations and mutant
libraries to study caste from a developmental perspective using highly controlled and
replicated experimental methods. 2) The application of recent advances in population
and comparative genomics to understand the genetic basis of caste evolution in natural
ant populations and validation of results using laboratory experiments. 3) The generation
of a large-scale database of caste morphology across both living and fossil ant species,
and the application of these data to test specific predictions about how the mechanisms
of caste development have constrained and facilitated caste evolution throughout the
ants. This research will provide some of the first mechanistic insights into caste
development and evolution, and will promote a unified understanding of epigenetics,
phenotypic plasticity, and emergent properties in biological systems.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10260460
- **Project number:** 5DP5OD029792-02
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY
- **Principal Investigator:** Waring Trible
- **Activity code:** DP5 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $422,500
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2020-09-10 → 2025-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10260460

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10260460, The Molecular Basis of Caste Development and Evolution in Ants (5DP5OD029792-02). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10260460. Licensed CC0.

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