Browsing by Author "Ketola, Katri"

Darwinian selection can be measured and investigated from gene sequences. A certain gene form favored by positive selection will become more common in the population. Detecting strong positive selection is rare, but it has been found to affect genes involved in immune defense and perception of odorants. Genes under positive selection have a possible role in speciation or adaptation. This is why chemical communication, being based on the sense of smell, is an interesting topic for measuring natural selection and positive selection in particular. Social insects, such as ants, are model organisms for chemical communication. They use chemical communication not only for finding nutrition and detecting intruders, but also in coordinating the activities of several thousands of colony members. Insects perceive odorant signal molecules with their antennae. Odorant binding proteins (OBP) and chemosensory proteins (CSP) bind and transport odorant molecules through the sensillar lymph. OBPs and CSPs are also suspected to have a role in selecting odorants. This work focuses on two OBP genes and two CSP genes to study natural selection. All of these genes are conserved among all ant species. Three of these genes, OBP1, CSP1 and CSP7, are strongly expressed in the antennae suggesting that they function in chemical communication. CSP7 also has a known function in nest mate recognition in ants and OBP1 is known to bind a queen pheromone in the honeybee. The data includes gene sequences from 7 Formica ant species (270 sequences in total). The main goals of the research were to find out 1) the extent of variation between and within closely related ant species, 2) which evolutionary forces, natural selection or random drift, are behind the variation and 3) are there systematic differences between the two social forms of ants suggesting that these genes would affect the social structure of an ant colony. The variation in the sequence data was visualized by phylogenetic, principal coordinate and fixed differences analyses. Differences between populations were studied by FST values. The evolutionary forces shaping chemical communication genes within the species and populations, were studied by McDonald-Kreitman test, Tajima s D, Fu and Li test and MFDM test. The data shows that two of the species, F. cinerea and F. exsecta, significantly differ from the other five ant species, the F. rufa group species, and that the F. rufa group species don t significantly differ from each other based on these genes and this data. This could be due to their recent speciation or crossing between the species leading to hybrids in the data. The results of the evolutionary analyses are inconsistent. However, CSP7 has the strongest indication of selection based on all of the tests. Possible selection and sequence variation was detected at a predicted transcription factor binding site in F. cinerea. This indicates that selection might affect the regulation of CSP7. In the future it would be interesting to check the true transcription factor binding sites experimentally.