Despite what you might’ve seen in 1950s monster movies, it’sย difficult to raise mutant ants. For years biologists have altered the genetics of organisms as varied as mice and rice. Mutant fruit flies are a laboratory staple. But ants’ complex life cycleย hampered efforts to grow genetically engineered ants โ until now.
โฆ
Claude Desplan, a New York University biologist and an author of one of the studies, said that, as far as he could tell,ย these ants areย โthe first mutant in any social insect.โ
โฆ
Desplan’s research group chose to study a species ofย jumping ant found in India,ย Harpegnathos saltator, because all of these ants areย potentially fertile.ย โฆ
Using theย CRISPR-Cas9ย technique…scientists knocked out a crucial component of theย ant’s odor receptors.
Pheromones, the odors by which ants communicate, are their social medium.
Share this article
โฆ
The behavior of the mutants changed dramatically. The Indian jumping ants wandered away from the colony and wouldn’t forage.
โฆ
Research such as this opens the door for new model organisms, in Desplan’s view. Ifย the traditional bioscience method is to ask many questions of theย same organism โ such as mice or fruit flies โ then genetic engineering techniques allow biologists to ask very specific questions to anย animal that fits their needs.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post:ย Scientists create the first mutant ants
