Data from: A caste differentiation mutant elucidates the evolution of socially parasitic ants

Most ant species have two distinct female castes – queens and workers –
yet the developmental and genetic mechanisms that produce these
alternative phenotypes remain poorly understood. Working with the clonal
raider ant, Ooceraea biroi, we discovered a variant strain that expresses
queen-like traits in individuals that would normally become workers. The
variants show changes in morphology, behavior, and fitness that cause them
to rely on workers in wild-type (WT) colonies for survival. Overall, they
resemble the queens of many obligately parasitic ants that have
evolutionarily lost the worker caste and live inside colonies of closely
related hosts. To understand the genetic basis of this variant
strain, which we term the queen-like mutants (QLM), we re-analyzed
published PacBio and Hi-C data (McKenzie and Kronauer 2018) using the
Falcon pipeline.