Measuring site fidelity and spatial segregation within animal societies

© 2017 The Authors. Methods in Ecology and Evolution published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society. Animals often display a marked tendency to return to previously visited locations that contain important resources, such as water, food, or developing brood that must be provisioned. A considerable body of work has demonstrated that this tendency is strongly expressed in ants, which exhibit fidelity to particular sites both inside and outside the nest. However, thus far many studies of this phenomena have taken the approach of reducing an animal's trajectory to a summary statistic, such as the area it covers. Using both simulations of biased random walks, and empirical trajectories from individual rock ants, Temnothorax albipennis, we demonstrate that this reductive approach suffers from an unacceptably high rate of false negatives. To overcome this, we describe a site-centric approach which, in combination with a spatially-explicit null model, allows the identification of the important sites towards which individuals exhibit statistically significant biases. Using the ant trajectories, we illustrate how the site-centric approach can be combined with social network analysis tools to detect groups of individuals whose members display similar space-use patterns. We also address the mechanistic origin of individual site fidelity; by examining the sequence of visits to each site, we detect a statistical signature associated with a self-attracting walk – a non-Markovian movement model that has been suggested as a possible mechanism for generating individual site fidelity

Gene expression time delays & Turing pattern formation systems

The incorporation of time delays can greatly affect the behaviour of partial differential equations and dynamical systems. In addition, there is evidence that time delays in gene expression due to transcription and translation play an important role in the dynamics of cellular systems. In this paper, we investigate the effects of incorporating gene expression time delays into a one-dimensional putative reaction diffusion pattern formation mechanism on both stationary domains and domains with spatially uniform exponential growth. While oscillatory behaviour is rare, we find that the time taken to initiate and stabilise patterns increases dramatically as the time delay is increased. In addition, we observe that on rapidly growing domains the time delay can induce a failure of the Turing instability which cannot be predicted by a naive linear analysis of the underlying equations about the homogeneous steady state. The dramatic lag in the induction of patterning, or even its complete absence on occasions, highlights the importance of considering explicit gene expression time delays in models for cellular reaction diffusion patterning

Elastic interactions of active cells with soft materials

Anchorage-dependent cells collect information on the mechanical properties of the environment through their contractile machineries and use this information to position and orient themselves. Since the probing process is anisotropic, cellular force patterns during active mechanosensing can be modelled as anisotropic force contraction dipoles. Their build-up depends on the mechanical properties of the environment, including elastic rigidity and prestrain. In a finite sized sample, it also depends on sample geometry and boundary conditions through image strain fields. We discuss the interactions of active cells with an elastic environment and compare it to the case of physical force dipoles. Despite marked differences, both cases can be described in the same theoretical framework. We exactly solve the elastic equations for anisotropic force contraction dipoles in different geometries (full space, halfspace and sphere) and with different boundary conditions. These results are then used to predict optimal position and orientation of mechanosensing cells in soft material.Comment: Revtex, 38 pages, 8 Postscript files included; revised version, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev.

Bond graph modelling of chemoelectrical energy transduction

Energy-based bond graph modelling of biomolecular systems is extended to include chemoelectrical transduction thus enabling integrated thermodynamically-compliant modelling of chemoelectrical systems in general and excitable membranes in particular. Our general approach is illustrated by recreating a well-known model of an excitable membrane. This model is used to investigate the energy consumed during a membrane action potential thus contributing to the current debate on the trade-off between the speed of an action potential event and energy consumption. The influx of Na+ is often taken as a proxy for energy consumption; in contrast, this paper presents an energy based model of action potentials. As the energy based approach avoids the assumptions underlying the proxy approach it can be directly used to compute energy consumption in both healthy and diseased neurons. These results are illustrated by comparing the energy consumption of healthy and degenerative retinal ganglion cells using both simulated and in vitro data

Recombination, chromosome number and eusociality in the Hymenoptera

Extraordinarily high rates of recombination have been observed in some eusocial species. The most popular explanation is that increased recombination increases genetic variation among workers, which in turn increases colony performance, for example by increasing parasite resistance. However, support for the generality of higher recombination rates among eusocial organisms remains weak, due to low sample size and a lack of phylogenetic independence of observations. Recombination rate, although difficult to measure directly, is correlated with chromosome number. As predicted, several authors have noted that chromosome numbers are higher among the eusocial species of Hymenoptera (ants, bees and wasps). Here, we present a formal comparative analysis of karyotype data from 1567 species of Hymenoptera. Contrary to earlier studies, we find no evidence for an absolute difference between chromosome number in eusocial and solitary species of Hymenoptera. However, we find support for an increased rate of chromosome number change in eusocial taxa. We show that among eusocial taxa colony size is able to explain some of the variation in chromosome number: intermediate-sized colonies have more chromosomes than those that are either very small or very large. However, we were unable to detect effects of a number of other colony characteristics predicted to affect recombination rate – including colony relatedness and caste number. Taken together, our results support the view that a eusocial lifestyle has led to variable selection pressure for increased recombination rates, but that identifying the factors contributing to this variable selection will require further theoretical and empirical effort

Growth Based Morphogenesis of Vertebrate Limb Bud

Many genes and their regulatory relationships are involved in developmental phenomena. However, by chemical information alone, we cannot fully understand changing organ morphologies through tissue growth because deformation and growth of the organ are essentially mechanical processes. Here, we develop a mathematical model to describe the change of organ morphologies through cell proliferation. Our basic idea is that the proper specification of localized volume source (e.g., cell proliferation) is able to guide organ morphogenesis, and that the specification is given by chemical gradients. We call this idea “growth-based morphogenesis.” We find that this morphogenetic mechanism works if the tissue is elastic for small deformation and plastic for large deformation. To illustrate our concept, we study the development of vertebrate limb buds, in which a limb bud protrudes from a flat lateral plate and extends distally in a self-organized manner. We show how the proportion of limb bud shape depends on different parameters and also show the conditions needed for normal morphogenesis, which can explain abnormal morphology of some mutants. We believe that the ideas shown in the present paper are useful for the morphogenesis of other organs