The protein that keeps worker ants in line can also make them queen

, a team of biologists and geneticists report that they’ve cracked it. Switching the expression of just a single protein, Kr-h1 , in the brains of ants is enough to initiate a cascade of changes and launch a worker toward queendom.

Kr-h1’s job is to respond to the commands of two hormones—a juvenile hormone found more in workers and an ecdysone hormone found in greater abundance in queens. Give a 10-day old ant more juvenile hormone, and Kr-h1 will shut down genes related to queenliness and promote worker genes. Give an ant ecdysone and Kr-h1 will do the opposite, promoting queen-like behaviors.

In these ants, Kr-h1 acts like a toggle between two states. But future work will need to determine just how these proteins and hormones influence specific behaviors, University of Fribourg neuroscientist Adria LeBoeuf, who studies social insects but did not participate in the work, told. “Somehow these hormones end up in the brain, [but] we don’t know how they get there,” or why only certain genes respond to them, she said.

Still, the fact that the same protein silences different genes in the brains of different ant castes and essentially controls that segregation is surprising, Roberto Bonasio, a molecular epigeneticist at the University of Pennsylvania and a co-author of the paper, said in a. “We thought that these jobs would be assigned to two or more different factors, each of them only present in one or the other brain.

The key message is that ants have all the wiring for multiple behavioral patterns that are only carried out depending on which genes are activated, Berger said in the same statement. “In other words, the parts of both Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde are already written into the genome; everyone can play either role, depending on which gene switches are turned on or off.”Popular Science

So basically how vaginas work with humans

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