Paper on Social Chromosomes Accepted

Our paper on the genetic diversity of the fire ant social chromosomes has been accepted in Molecular Ecology and is now available online!

The fire ant social chromosomes carry a supergene that controls the number of queens in a colony. We describe a few features of this supergene system:

• The two variants of the social chromosomes are differentiated from each other over the supergene region, but without any evidence of evolutionary strata.
• There is a large number non-synonymous substitutions between the two variants.
• The never recombining variant Sb is almost fixed in the North American population.

You can check out the press release, which covers some of the details about our work.

The full reference is: R Pracana, A Priyam, I Levantis, RA Nichols and Y Wurm. (2017) The fire ant social chromosome supergene variant Sb shows low diversity but high divergence from SB Molecular Ecology. DOI: 10.1111/mec.14054

February 21, 2017

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