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LOCATION:Conf Room/Building 14\, EMBL Rome\, Adriano Buzzati-Traverso Campu
 s\, Via Ramarini 32\, 00015 Monterotondo\, Italy
SUMMARY;LANGUAGE=en-us:Roberto Bonasio: Socially induced brain plasticity a
 nd behavioral reprogramming in ants
DESCRIPTION:External Faculty Speaker\nSpeaker: Roberto Bonasio\nInstitution
 : Perelman School of Medicine\nUniversity of Pennsylvania\nPhiladelphia\, 
 PA\, USA\nHost: Marzia Munafo` & Rahul Sureka\nAbstract: Social insects ar
 e an ideal system to study the role of gene regulation in brain developmen
 t and function because individuals from different castes (workers and quee
 ns) display dramatic different behaviors despite sharing the same genome. 
 \nWe have been developing the ant Harpegnathos saltator as a model organis
 m because of its unique phenotypic plasticity. In Harpegnathos ants\, adul
 t workers can become queens via a caste transition that results in germlin
 e activation\, lifespan extension\, and major changes in behavior. This tr
 ansition can be induced and reversed and offers a unique experimental para
 digm to study the molecular regulation of behavioral and neuroanatomical p
 lasticity. In the past ten years\, we have sequenced the Harpegnathos geno
 me\, determined that all major epigenetic pathways are conserved and activ
 e in this organism\, and have established various manipulation techniques\
 , including gene knockdowns and genome editing.\nUsing various functional 
 genomics approaches\, we discovered that as brains of workers transition t
 o queen they display a remarkable degree of molecular and cellular plastic
 ity. At a molecular level\, hundreds of coding and noncoding genes are dif
 ferentially regulated in the brain\, suggesting that transcriptional repro
 gramming contributes to the observed changes in behavior. Among these\, we 
 discovered a transcription factor that participates in caste selection by 
 repressing genes from the opposite caste in response to socially-regulated 
 hormones. At a cellular level\, we found that neuroprotective glia cells e
 xpand as workers become queens\, perhaps contributing to their extended li
 fespan\, and that a population of neurons in the mushroom body also increa
 ses in relative frequency after the transition. Our results reveal that so
 cially regulated changes in gene expression induce brain remodeling and be
 havioral reprogramming in Harpegnathos.\n\n
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