The answer to questions about growing older may be squished under the shoes of ASU students.
School of Life Sciences associate professor Juergen Liebig is studying the development of ants as a model for human aging.
The Maryland-based Howard Hughes Medical Institute awarded Liebig and two other scientists with a Collaborative Innovation Award in November to research what determines lifespan and behavior differences in ants, and how it relates to humans.
Liebig will work with Danny Reinberg from the New York University School of Medicine and Shelley Berger from the Wistar Institute in Philadelphia.
“We want to understand the underlying reasons for our differences in behavior development and aging,” Liebig said.
Robert Page is the founding director and foundation professor of the School of Life Sciences.
“[In social insects] the social environment itself is responsible for the developmental differences that result in different life spans,” he said.
Page said the ants that Liebig studies have queens that live for years and workers that live for days.
“The differences in queens and workers are based on epigenetic factors,” Page said.
Epigenetics refers to changes in gene expression caused by factors outside the genome sequence itself, like the environment.
“We need to understand how these factors affect the expression of the genome external from the genome,” Page said.
While all ants are genetically similar, Liebig said, they still develop different types of ants, like workers and queens. Their behavior, body types and purpose become very different from one another despite genetic similarities.
Page said ants are fed different amounts of food as larvae, and the amount of nutrition determines what type of ant the larvae become.
Epigenetic factors affect humans as well as insects, Page said. Identical twins have the same genes, he said, but can be very different based off epigenetic factors.
The difficult first step for Liebig and his research partners is to complete the genome sequence for three ant species.
“It’s very unpredictable,” Liebig said. “It’s very hard to say when the genomes will be completed.”
The Collaborative Innovation Award is a $40 million pilot program given to research projects with three to six scientists working together on a single problem.
“It’s a very prestigious award for this campus,” Page said. He said the school has other grants from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute as well.
While the goal of the project is to use ants as a model for human aging, the long-term meaning of the research is not as clear.
“We can never predict exactly what this would mean,” Liebig said.
He hopes to find the basics in aging, but the research could also lead to a better understanding of epigenetics.
“The big question is going to be ‘How does this affect aging?’” Page said. He said the research could find signaling mechanisms, special proteins or how different classes of genes might be involved in the aging process.
For example, Page said, bees and ants produce special proteins that protect cells from oxidation, which is a theory of how aging happens.
“If we understand these processes, we can help understand it in humans,” he said.
Reach the reporter at cogino@asu.edu.
