BPCPPDYSOE21 – scientific programme
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BP: Fachverband Biologische Physik
BP 9: Systems Biology II
BP 9.2: Talk
Monday, March 22, 2021, 14:30–14:50, BPc
Specialisation and plasticity in a primitive social insect — Solenn Patalano1, •Adolfo Alsina2, Carlos Gregorio-Rodriguez3, Martin Bachman4, Stephanie Dreier5, Irene Hernando-Herraez6, Paulin Nana7, Shankar Balasubramanian4, Seirian Sumner5, Wolf Reik1, and Steffen Rulands2 — 1The Babraham Institute, Cambridge, UK — 2Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems, Dresden, Germany — 3Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM), Madrid, Spain — 4University of Cambridge, Cambridge , UK — 5Institute of Zoology, London , UK — 6Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG), Barcelona , Spain — 7University of Dschang, Ebolowa, Cameroon
Biological systems not only have the remarkable capacity to build and maintain complex spatio-temporal structures in noisy environments, they can also rapidly break up and rebuild such structures. How can such systems can simultaneously achieve both robust specialisation and plasticity is poorly understood. Here we use primitive societies of Polistes wasps as a model system where we experimentally perturb the social structure by removing the queen and follow the relaxation dynamics back to the social steady state over time. We combine a unique experimental strategy correlating measurements across vastly different spatial scales with a theoretical approach. We show that Polistes integrates antagonistic processes on multiple scales to distinguish between extrinsic and intrinsic perturbations and thereby achieve both robust specialisation and rapid plasticity. Such dynamics provide a general principle of how both specialization and plasticity can be achieved in biological systems.