The Department of Biology is excited to invite you to the Dr. Inouye Memorial Lecture Series seminar entitled "Insights from insect societies: from communication to aging" by Dr. Anindita Brahma, Postdoctoral researcher at Rockefeller University on Monday, November 2nd at 3pm in BL234. We kindly ask you to make every effort to attend.

Host: Dr. Samira Abdulai-Saiku

More information about the speaker here: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/people/anindita-brahma/

Abstract: Social insects like wasps, ants, and bees live in complex societies and exhibit sophisticated social behavior, communication, division of labor, and striking variation in longevity depending on their social roles. The study of these insect societies could therefore shed light on several important topics, including behavioral plasticity, communication, and aging. The clonal raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, is an emerging model system in neuroscience. This blind ant relies primarily on olfaction for social communication. O. biroi has an expanded odorant receptor (OR) repertoire, and the development of its olfactory system shows more resemblance to that in mammals compared to that in other insects like fruit flies. Single-nuclei transcriptomics of olfactory sensory neurons (OSNs) showed massive coexpression of ORs, reminiscent of the maturing OSNs in the mammalian olfactory epithelium. However, a novel post-transcriptional regulatory mechanism ensures that only one of the coexpressing ORs gets transported into the cytoplasm, while the remaining ORs remain sequestered in the nucleus. Such a mode of OR expression is distinct from that observed in the canonical model system. This finding opens newer avenues toward understanding the molecular basis of olfaction. Moreover, it shows that these non-canonical model systems can yield novel insights into well-known biological mechanisms, such as aging and longevity.