Researchers at the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom have found that leaf-cutter ants have a simple system to build up healthful microbes on their exoskeletons—a system the researchers hope will have implications for human health.
Leaf-cutter ants—which get their name from cutting and collecting leaves on which they grow their fungus diet—rely on microbes to produce the antibiotics that protect the farmed fungus from harmful pathogens. "We argue that the ant host has evolved living conditions under which antibiotic-producing bacteria have a competitive advantage for the ant niche,” biologist at East Anglia and senior author of the study Douglas Yu told Phys.Org.
In the study, published online last month (August 22) in Ecology Letters, Yu and his colleagues generated a model in which leaf-cutter ants select for helpful microbes by passing on the beneficial bugs to the next generation, (1) and providing a lot of food for ...
