The gang-of-four ready to take over the ant world. From left: Philip Ward, Seán Brady, Ted Schultz and Brian Fisher at the IUSSI congress in Sapporo, Japan.

It was at the XIV international meeting of the International Union for the Study of Social Insects in 2002 that the “gang of four” decided to join forces to reconstruct the phylogenetic history of ants using molecular data.  Four years later Brady et al. 2006 was published.

One problem, though, is that in order to determine the correct correspondence between single positions on different species, that is, in order to align the sequences we need information about what nucleotides are to the left and right of the position of interest¹. The same has to be done for those flanking positions as well, simultaneously. And since species are related by common ancestry as a result of a process of divergent evolution, they have to be compared within a tree-shaped phylogenetic framework. So it is best if we align sequences at the same time that we search for the phylogenetic trees.

That is all one really needs to know. The remaining positions in the DNA sequence are just serial homologues.

Note

Us working with ants just love to have plenty of databases and digital content available at a click of a button to assist in our malevolent plan to turn these vicious little creatures against humanity.

From Laurent Keller’s laboratory in Switzerland now comes Fourmidable, a web-accessible database for all things related to ant genomics. It is aimed primary at molecular data generated from research into the genetics of social behavior. It currently contains genomic data on two model species, the fire ant Solenopsis invicta and the black garden ant Lasius niger, but it hopes to become a central repository for the curation and management of data from any ant species.

A detailed description of the project has just been published in the open access journal BMC Genomics.