Charissa de Bekker

Charissa de Bekker

Aug 21, 2014

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2

Check out this new paper from my colleague Raquel!

Hi guys,

You might have already picked up on this, since her work is all over the news :), but just in case I wanted to make sure that you knew about this beautiful study my colleague Raquel just published. Raquel is a very talented grad student in the Hughes Lab who spent an awful amount of time recording data in the Atlantic rainforest of Brazil about the disease dynamics of the zombie ant phenomenon. She published her paper open access in PLoS One, so you can read the actual paper here. Especially have a look at the movie she attached to the paper. This movie shows you how the ant trails coming from the ant nest change over time and where the new dead ants appear to release their spores on the trails to infect new ants. SO COOL!

Next to that, many different news sources picked up on her work the last couple of days. Here's a small selection:

IFLS

ET

Washington Post

Motherboard

FOX News

Penn State News

Hope you all enjoy the read! And if you have any questions about this work, post them in the comments as Raquel can read the comments as well and I bet she'd be happy to try and answer them!

Cheers,

Charissa

2 comments

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  • RicardoAWelch
    RicardoAWelch
    Thank you! for sharing this great post.
    Jan 30, 2019
  • Raquel
    RaquelBacker
    Thanks for sharing the paper Charissa!
    Aug 21, 2014

About This Project

Some parasites are able to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. One striking example is the "zombie ant" phenomenon, where ants infected by a parasitic fungus are manipulated to bite into vegetation followed by death and fungal growth out of the ant's neck. This research project aims to unravel how this parasite establishes zombie-like host behavior by discovering the genes that are important.
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