Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®
Articles 1 - 1 of 1
Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences
A Cophylogenetic Analysis Of Fungus Gardening Ants And Their Symbiotic Fungi, Katherine Beigel
A Cophylogenetic Analysis Of Fungus Gardening Ants And Their Symbiotic Fungi, Katherine Beigel
Biology Theses
Fungus-growing ants (Tribe Attini) and their fungal cultivars share a 50-million-year coevolutionary history. Large scale phylogenetic analyses depict a strong co-phyletic signal among ants and their farmed fungi yet fungus sharing among unrelated ant lineages is somewhat widespread. An overview of sharing has been hampered by a lack of genetic markers that exhibit intraspecific variation and surveys across geographic regions. For example, previous studies have shown similar sequences of the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of fungus in different species of Trachymyrmex, suggesting that these ant species are farming the same fungal clone. To examine whether this was a …