ANTS AND UNCLES: Members of carpenter ant (Camponotus floridanus) colonies come in a variety of shapes and sizes that fit into different castes, including the queen (top), major workers (bottom right), minor workers (next to major workers), and reproductive male and female swarmers (bottom left)COURTESY OF CHAOYANG YE AND JEURGEN LIEBIGThe cold room in biochemist Danny Reinberg’s lab at the New York University Langone School of Medicine is anything but. Illuminated for 12 hours a day and kept at 25 °C, the room is downright balmy. But entomophobes would be well advised to steer clear: this room is filled not with test tubes and petri dishes, but with ants. Lots and lots of ants.
Housed in hundreds of transparent shoebox-size plastic containers, the ants are part of an ongoing effort to establish a new model system for studying behavioral epigenetics, or what Reinberg, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) investigator, calls “epigenetics in action.”
The idea of establishing an ant colony as a model system for epigenetics dates back nearly 12 years to a conversation Reinberg had with Shelley Berger, an epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania. Berger had recently returned from a family vacation in Costa Rica, where she spent time watching leaf-cutter ants in action. Ant colonies are highly homogeneous, genetically speaking. Yet their members vary dramatically in shape, size, and behavior. “In some cases the worker and queen are absolutely identical genetically, and ...
