Juvenile hormone as a key regulator for asymmetric caste differentiation in ants.

Caste differentiation involves many functional traits that diverge during larval growth and metamorphosis to produce adults irreversibly adapted to reproductive division of labor. Investigating developmental differentiation is important for general biological understanding and has increasingly been explored for social phenotypes that diverge in parallel from similar genotypes. Here, we use ants to investigate the extent to which canalized worker development can be shifted toward gyne (virgin-queen) phenotypes by juvenile hormone (JH) treatment.

From the inside out: Were the cuticular bacteria of fungus-farming ants originally domesticated as gut symbionts?

The mutualistic interaction specificity between attine ants and antibiotic-producing Actinobacteria has been controversial because strains cannot always be isolated from worker cuticles across attine ant species, while other actinobacteria can apparently replace and also inhibit growth of mycopathogens. Here we report that across field samples of Panamanian species: (i) Cuticular were largely restricted to species in the crown of the attine phylogeny and their appearance likely coincided with the first attines colonizing Central/North America. (ii) The phylogenetically basal attines almost always had cuticular associations with other Actinobacteria than .

Spatial distributions of white matter hyperintensities on brain MRI: A pooled analysis of individual participant data from 11 memory clinic cohorts.

Introduction: The spatial distribution of white matter hyperintensities (WMH) on MRI is often considered in the diagnostic evaluation of patients with cognitive problems. In some patients, clinicians may classify WMH patterns as "unusual", but this is largely based on expert opinion, because detailed quantitative information about WMH distribution frequencies in a memory clinic setting is lacking. Here we report voxel wise 3D WMH distribution frequencies in a large multicenter dataset and also aimed to identify individuals with unusual WMH patterns.