Our paper on the social chromosome of Cataglphis niger is now published in Current Biology!
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2026.01.067
The surprising finding is the homology of the Cataglyphis social chromosome to the Solenopsis social chromosome. This means that this is an ancient chromosome dating back to the common ancestor of most ant species, more than 90 million years . Moreover, it’s partially conserve all the way to bees! There is a large cluster of genes in the supergene of both species that has conservred gene order, indicating exceptional conservation of this gene set.
It appears that both Cataglyphis and Solenopsis lineages evolved a supergene in the same ancestral chromosome relatively recently – approximately 1 million years ago. This seems an unlikely coincident. Possibly, this is could be because there is an ancient “molecular toolkit” of genes on this chromosome that is particularly useful for social evolution. Possibly, this chromosome frequently evolves and loses social supergenes in many ant lineages over many millions of years.
