Acromyrmex echinatior Raw sequence reads. Acromyrmex echinatior

Ants rely on their olfaction to recognise their nestmates and maintain the cohesion of the colony. They recognize their nestmates by colony specific olfactory labels that individuals store as neural templates in their memory. Learning continuously shapes the nestmate recognition template to keep up with the constant changes in colony labels. Here we seek to investigate the mechanism involve in construction of the colony template at the peripheral nervous system responses in term of ORs distribution. We used both behavioural analysis and antennae transcriptomes of Acromyrmex echinatior ants and subjected them to different olfactory treatments. We show in line of other studies that prolonged exposure to non nestmate odours reduces workers aggression towards their label. In our case, the treatment not only affected the behaviour of the ants but also the expression of their ORs as well as other genes involved in olfactory and sensory transduction in their antennas. Interestingly, we show that the ORs profile was colony specific as much as the label is. Additionally, when we exposed different colonies to the same non nestmate odour, the initial separation between the olfactory system gene expression, relative to colonies profiles, disappeared. This indicates that, as their olfactory environments became similar, their ORs profiles also became similar. We looked at the odour exposure effect and realise that as the ants olfactory environments change, their OR profiles seem to adapt to new sensory realities. When ants habituate to the odour of another colony, it effectively changes both the nestmate recognition template and the peripheral nervous system that seems to optimize its sensitivity allowing maybe the ants to remain able to perceived relevant cue in their environment.