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The birth of ant genomics

Today science is in the age of biology and biology is in the age of genomics. Sequencing the entire genome of an organism, an enterprise that could not have been imagined barely 50 y ago, is being thought of as the first step toward a complete understanding of its biology. If I had been asked to recommend just two families of living organisms from which to pick the first two species for whole-genome sequencing, I would surely have suggested Hominidae (with ourselves) and Formicidae (with all ants). My choice of the ant family is easy to justify. The family Formicidae consists of approximately 14,000 species of ants, all of which exhibit advanced and sophisticated social life, not unlike our own in many respects and perhaps surpassing us in some ways. The ants live in colonies headed by one or a small number of fertile queens and large number (which can sometimes run into millions) of sterile workers, and display sophisticated division of labor and most impressive levels of communication and coordination among colony members (Fig 1). One of the many features of great interest is the vastly different phenotypes and lifespans of queens and workers, despite developing from the same genome. Ants have achieved spectacular ecological success and dominance, accounting for more than a third of all insect biomass and, along with termites, for more than 25% of all animal biomass in some tropical forests (1).