MONTREAL—Canadian scientists have managed to double the size of experimental ants by unlocking the mystery of how an animal’s environment affects how big it grows, the Toronto Star reports.
“It’s kind of making big news,” said Ehab Abouheif of McGill University’s evolutionary and developmental biology lab and co-author of a paper published Wednesday in Nature Communications.
Abouheif and his fellow researchers, including McGill geneticist Moshe Syzf, started by looking at ant colonies and asking: Why are some ants of the same species big and other ones small?
They headed out to ant colonies and gathered samples of the social insects. They found that their size seemed to depend on how much a single gene known as EGFR had been “coated” by a chemical process called methylation.
About 70 percent of size differences between individual ants could be explained by how heavily methylated the gene was — statistically, a highly convincing result.
The team then turned the process around. By manipulating the methylation of that one gene, they were able to grow ants that were twice as big or half the size of normal — from 1.6 to 2.5 millimetres long.
Source: Toronto Star
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