Our paper is online at Ecology and Evolution!

This study was the Ph.D. project of Viet-Dai Dang, at the lab of John Wang. Dai carried out very challenging RNA-seq analyses of the antennae of Solenopsis invicta fire ant workers from different genotype groups of the social chromosome. Amir from our lab contributed to the bioinformatic analysis of these data to identify 81 genes that are differentially expressed between genotype groups. These included 13 genes implicated in chemical metabolism or perception. We were especially interested the differential expression of one odorant receptor (SiOR463) and one odorant binding protein (SiOBP12). We found SiOR463 was deleted in the Sb haplotype of the social chromosome, while SiOBP12 was duplicated in Sb.