A female-biased gene expression signature of dominance in cooperatively breeding meerkats

Show simple item record

dc.contributor.author Campbell, C. Ryan
dc.contributor.author Manser, Marta B.
dc.contributor.author Shiratori, Mari
dc.contributor.author Williams, Kelly
dc.contributor.author Barreiro, Luis
dc.contributor.author Clutton-Brock, Tim H.
dc.contributor.author Tung, Jenny
dc.date.accessioned 2024-09-10T07:56:41Z
dc.date.available 2024-09-10T07:56:41Z
dc.date.issued 2024
dc.description DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT : The raw reads generated in this study and a matrix of gene counts are available in the NCBI Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) repository, GSE247525. Other data sets used in this study are contained within the article supplementary data files and analysis code is available at https://github.com/cryancampbell/meerkatPaper. en_US
dc.description.abstract Dominance is a primary determinant of social dynamics and resource access in social animals. Recent studies show that dominance is also reflected in the gene regulatory profiles of peripheral immune cells. However, the strength and direction of this relationship differs across the species and sex combinations investigated, potentially due to variation in the predictors and energetic consequences of dominance status. Here, we investigated the association between social status and gene expression in the blood of wild meerkats (Suricata suricatta; n = 113 individuals), including in response to lipopolysaccharide, Gardiquimod (an agonist of TLR7, which detects single-stranded RNA in vivo) and glucocorticoid stimulation. Meerkats are cooperatively breeding social carnivores in which breeding females physically outcompete other females to suppress reproduction, resulting in high reproductive skew. They therefore present an opportunity to disentangle the effects of social dominance from those of sex per se. We identify a sex-specific signature of dominance, including 1045 differentially expressed genes in females but none in males. Dominant females exhibit elevated activity in innate immune pathways and a larger fold-change response to LPS challenge. Based on these results and a preliminary comparison to other mammals, we speculate that the gene regulatory signature of social status in the immune system depends on the determinants and energetic costs of social dominance, such that it is most pronounced in hierarchies where physical competition is important and reproductive skew is large. Such a pattern has the potential to mediate life history trade-offs between investment in reproduction versus somatic maintenance. en_US
dc.description.department Mammal Research Institute en_US
dc.description.librarian hj2024 en_US
dc.description.sdg SDG-15:Life on land en_US
dc.description.sponsorship North Carolina Biotechnology Center; Division of Integrative Organismal Systems; Human Frontier Science Program; H2020 European Research Council; National Institute on Aging. en_US
dc.description.uri http://www.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/mec en_US
dc.identifier.citation Campbell, C. R., Manser, M., Shiratori, M., Williams, K., Barreiro, L., Clutton-Brock, T., & Tung, J. (2024). A female-biased gene expression signature of dominance in cooperatively breeding meerkats. Molecular Ecology, 00, e17467. https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.17467. en_US
dc.identifier.issn 0962-1083 (print)
dc.identifier.issn 1365-294X (online)
dc.identifier.other 10.1111/mec.17467
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/2263/98096
dc.language.iso en en_US
dc.publisher Wiley en_US
dc.rights © 2024 The Author(s). Molecular Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. en_US
dc.subject Meerkat (Suricata suricatta) en_US
dc.subject Cooperative breeding en_US
dc.subject Gene expression en_US
dc.subject Inflammation en_US
dc.subject Reproductive skew en_US
dc.subject Social dominance en_US
dc.subject SDG-15: Life on land en_US
dc.title A female-biased gene expression signature of dominance in cooperatively breeding meerkats en_US
dc.type Article en_US


Files in this item

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record