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Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World imagined a future society where individuals are submitted from birth to chemical treatments and educational brainwashing to serve a predetermined role. He was inspired by ants, which indeed evolved queen and worker castes ~157 million years ago, now dominating insect biomass with more than 15,000 species, each with their variant of a brave new world that should never become humanity’s legacy.

Ant queens have longer lifespan and reproduce, while sterile workers forage, nurse and defend. These lifelong caste roles are established early in development through epigenetic modifications. This system offers a powerful model to investigate how genetically identical individuals can develop into distinct social phenotypes, especially through brain differentiation.This project will establish the first developmental brain atlas of queen- and worker-destined ants. 

Using ultra-low-input transcriptomics and proteomics across developmental stages in two ant species with distinct caste systems, we will identify the molecular mechanisms, including neuropeptides and gene regulatory networks, that guide caste-specific brain development. The uncovered key candidates will be functionally validated by confirming the expression profiling and gene knockdown experiments. In addition, we will explore their evolution by assessing natural selection and their conservation across insects and other animals, even in mammals. 

These analyses will offer insight into how social behavior is encoded during development and how such mechanisms are conserved across evolution, including in vertebrates.The outcome of this proposal will contribute novel perspectives to neuroscience by revealing how brains can be canalized into different social roles. They also have translational potential for identifying behavioral gene targets in other species, opening new avenues in social neurobiology and behavioral regulation.