Ants have been highly successful throughout the evolution: spreading over all continents except Antarctica and constituting 15~25% of total biomass on Earth. Leafcutter ant (Atta cephalotes) inarguably represents the most sophisticated social structure among numerous ant species. To understand the molecular mechanism of the caste determination and divergence, we extracted RNA from the head and DNA from the body of single workers based on their size and analyzed them by next-generation sequencing technique. The preliminary results demonstrate power of the approach to uncover underlying biology of leafcutter ants, which was not feasible before the advent of NGS technique using conventional model species.

• Taekyeong Yoo(Department of Biomedical Sciences, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Korea)
• Heon-Myoung Lim(Department of Zoological Research and Management, National Institute of Ecology, Korea)
• Soyeon Park(Division of Basic Research, National Institute of Ecology, Korea)
• Adrian Pinto(Department of Biochemistry, School of Medicine, University of Costa Rica, Costa Rica)
• Murom Choi(Department of Biomedical Sciences, Seoul National University College of Medicine, Korea)