Doaa Tehawey and Yara Ghnamah concluded their third-year projects and presented them today as posters! They both managed to finish and wrap up their analyses very nicely, in spite of covid19 challenges… Both projects were supervised by Aparna, and are part of her big project on the genomic basis of social polymorphism in Cataglyphis niger.

Doaa presented the analysis of 1000+ aggression assays between 30 nests sampled from the polymorphic population of C. niger in Tel Baruch beach, which includes monogyne colonies and a large polygyne supercolony. These behavioral assays will help us determine the social form of each sampled nest, to complement the genomic analyses.

Yara presented a phylogeny of mitochondrial haplotypes that she sequenced from the same 30 nests, which confirmed our working hypothesis that the monogyne an polygyne social forms are associated with distinct mitochondrial clades (in line with previous studies by Hefetz and colleagues).

These results will form the basis for ongoing genome-wide analyses from the same samples by Aparna.