Comparative transcriptomics reveals the conserved building blocks involved in parallel evolution of ant phenotypic traits. Formicidae

We build 17 de novo transcriptomes and applied weighted gene co-expression network analysis to transcriptomic data from 16 ant species (two social forms of Solenopsis invicta) from three sub-families of ants. In this study, we show the existence of conserved modules of co-expressed functionally related genes that are correlated with phenotypic differentiation between queens and workers.