
Graham J Thompson
Graham J Thompson
PhD (LaTrobe) MSc (Guelph) BSc (Guelph)
About
104
Publications
45,136
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,421
Citations
Introduction
Additional affiliations
January 1996 - January 1997
January 1994 - December 1995
September 1989 - December 1993
Publications
Publications (104)
The evolution of sterile helper castes in social insects implies selection on genes that underlie variation in this nonreproductive phenotype. These focal genes confer no direct fitness and are presumed to evolve through indirect fitness effects on the helper's reproducing relatives. This separation of a gene's phenotypic effect on one caste and it...
The concerns over honey bee health and colony collapse have led to an increased interest in the potential for beneficial bacteria as an intervention. However, the efficacy of this approach is mostly unknown because the application of bacterial adjuncts to hives has not often proceeded by understanding the strains being applied or how they function....
There is emerging concern regarding the unintentional and often unrecognized antimicrobial properties of “non-antimicrobial” pesticides. This includes insecticides, herbicides, and fungicides commonly used in agriculture that are known to produce broad ranging, off-target effects on beneficial wildlife, even at seemingly non-toxic low dose exposure...
The holobiont theory of evolution explains how individuals are deeply symbiotic with their gut microbes, such that microbes are adapted to influence host metabolism, immunity and behaviour, as signalled from the gut to the brain. For eusocial taxa like the Western honey bee (Apis mellifera), this brain-gut axis may scale up from the individual to a...
A Gram-negative, motile, rod-shaped bacterial strain, CA-0114 T , was isolated from the midgut of a western honey bee, Apis mellifera . The isolate exhibited ≤96.43 % 16S rRNA gene sequence identity (1540 bp) to members of the families Enterobacteriaceae and Erwiniaceae . Phylogenetic trees based on genome blast distance phylogeny and concatenated...
Managed populations of honey bees (Apis mellifera Linnaeus; Hymenoptera: Apidae) are regularly exposed to infectious diseases. Good hive management including the occasional application of antibiotics can help mitigate infectious outbreaks, but new beekeeping tools and techniques that bolster immunity and help control disease transmission are welcom...
The resilience of a healthcare system hinges on the adaptability of its teams. Thus far, healthcare teams have relied on well-defined scopes of practice to fulfill their safety mandate. While this feature has proven effective when dealing with stable situations, when it comes to disruptive events, healthcare teams find themselves navigating a fine...
Managed honey bee ( Apis mellifera ) populations play a crucial role in supporting pollination of food crops but are facing unsustainable colony losses, largely due to rampant disease spread within agricultural environments. While mounting evidence suggests that select lactobacilli strains (some being natural symbionts of honey bees) can protect ag...
Humans and other primates exhibit pro-social preferences for fairness. These preferences are thought to be reinforced by strong reciprocity, a policy that rewards fair actors and punishes unfair ones. Theories of fairness based on strong reciprocity have been criticized for overlooking the importance of individual differences in socially heterogene...
Paenibacillus larvae is a spore-forming bacterial entomopathogen and causal agent of the important honey bee larval disease, American foulbrood (AFB). Active infections by vegetative P. larvae are often deadly, highly transmissible, and incurable for colonies but, when dormant, the spore form of this pathogen can persist asymptomatically for years....
While undesirable, unexpected disruptions offer unique opportunities to enact adaptive expertise. For adaptive expertise to flourish, individuals and teams must embrace both efficiency and adaptation. While some industries do it readily, others continue to struggle with the tension between efficiency and adaptation, particularly when otherwise stab...
Analyzing the information-rich content of RNA can help uncover genetic events associated with social insect castes or other social polymorphisms. Here, we exploit a series of cDNA libraries previously derived from whole-body tissue of different castes as well as from three behaviourally distinct populations of the Eastern subterranean termite Retic...
Abstracts of papers presented at the 2021 virtual meeting on Biology & Genomics of Social Insects, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
For many animals, recognizing kin is an important aspect of social life. So fundamental is the notion that parents should direct care towards their own offspring that we rarely stop to question this biological rule, except when it is conspicuously broken by brood parasites. Choosing a mate from outside the family is likewise common enough that rare...
The process of caste differentiation is central to understanding insect sociality, because it is task specialization that enables division of labor within eusocial colonies. Selection presumably favors colonies that can adjust their division of labor in response to changing environmental demands, and for many taxa genetic and epigenetic factors are...
Widespread antibiotic usage in apiculture contributes substantially to the global dissemination of antimicrobial resistance and has the potential to negatively influence bacterial symbionts of honey bees (Apis mellifera). Here, we show that routine antibiotic administration with oxytetracycline selectively increased tetB (efflux pump resistance gen...
Pesticide exposure, infectious disease, and nutritional stress contribute to honey bee mortality and a high rate of colony loss. This realization has fueled a decades-long investigation into the single and combined effects of each stressor and their overall bearing on insect physiology. However, one element largely missing from this research effort...
The Serratia strain used in these experiments was isolated from naturally infected Z. angusticollis corpses. A Tryptic Soy Agar (TSA) plate was streaked from a frozen stock of Serratia marcescens, and incubated at 37 °C for 24 hours. A single colony forming unit (CFU) was used to inoculate 200 mL of sterile TSB which was then incubated for 12 hours...
Natural selection should favor the transfer of immune competence from one generation to the next in a context-dependent manner. Transgenerational immune priming (TGIP) is expected to evolve when species exploit pathogen-rich environments and exhibit extended overlap of parent-offspring generations. Dampwood termites are hemimetabolous, eusocial ins...
Managed populations of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera) support the production of a global food supply. This important role in modern agriculture has rendered honey bees vulnerable to the noxious effects of anthropogenic stressors such as pesticides. Although the deleterious outcomes of lethal pesticide exposure on honey bee health and perfo...
American foulbrood (AFB) is a highly virulent disease afflicting honey bees (Apis mellifera). The causative organism, Paenibacillus larvae, attacks honey bee brood and renders entire hives dysfunctional during active disease states, but more commonly resides in hives asymptomatically as inactive spores that elude even vigilant beekeepers. The mecha...
More than 200 colonies of the genus Longipeditermes were collected in our field surveys across the Sundaland region of Southeast Asia from 1998 to 2014. Two species, L. kistneri Akhtar & Ahmad and L. logipes Holmgren, are recognized and redescribed with color photographs of the workers and major soldiers. We use variation in characters of soldier c...
As published in Ontario Insects (1203-3995) - The Newsjournal of the Toronto Entomologists' Association.
The February meeting of the Toronto Entomologists' Association was held in the Ramsay Wright Laboratories at the University of Toronto. The guest speaker was Dr. Graham Thompson from Western University. His topic was termites and he presented...
On the cover: The cover image represents an ecological network featuring two honey bees foraging on wildflowers [PC: Emma Mullen, Cornell University]. As explained by Faragalla et al. in their Perspective and Hypothesis feature article [Vol. 330: 317-329]: ‘From Gene List to Gene Network: Recognizing the Functional Connections that Regulate Behavio...
The study of social breeding systems is often gene focused, and the field of insect sociobiology has been successful at assimilating tools and techniques from molecular biology. One common output from sociogenomic studies is a gene list. Gene lists are readily generated from microarray, RNA sequencing, or other molecular screens that typically aim...
Queen mandibular pheromone (QMP) is a potent reproductive signal to which honey bee workers respond by suppressing their ovaries and adopting alloparental roles within the colony. This anti‐ovarian effect of QMP on workers can, surprisingly, be induced in other insects, including fruit flies, in which females exposed to synthetic QMP develop smalle...
Termites are under strong selective pressures from pathogens colonizing their nesting and foraging sites. This is especially true for the incipient stages of colony foundation where primary reproductives build a copularium within microbial-rich wood. Because there is a high probability that both the reproductive pair and their offspring encounter t...
The caste system of social insects presents a classic polyphenism in which widely divergent reproductive and non-reproductive phenotypes are expressed from the same genome. In termites, the sterile soldier caste is particularly divergent in phenotype and presumably evolved under selection for defensiveness. In this study, we use genomic phylostrati...
Social insect colonies typically have well-defined social and physical boundaries but in some cases, colonies may take-on a more diffuse form with no obvious nestmate recognition or inter-colony aggression. Why colonies adopt closed versus open societies is not well understood, but it is presumably related to the genetic or environmental identity o...
Cover image:
“The defensive caste of the Eastern subterranean termite. Soldiers are specialized for defence of their colony, as evidenced by their assertive behaviour, enlarged heads and fortified mandibles. The three individuals shown here, positioned atop a small piece of wood, are collected from a colony in the City of Toronto (Canada), where t...
In a termite colony, reproduction is typically monopolized by a small number of sexuals that are supported by reproductively altruistic soldiers and workers. We expect caste differentiation to be associated with clear-cut differences in gene expression, and for these differences to reflect caste function and development. Here, we use RNA-Sequencing...
Galectins are multifunctional ?-galactoside-binding proteins that are involved in the regulation of cellular stress responses and differentiation. The relationship between these processes is unclear and we report here that galectins display oxidative-stress specific expression patterns in neutrophil-like differentiated HL-60 cells. Three galectins...
Honey bees secrete a queen mandibular pheromone
that renders workers reproductively altruistic and
drones sexually attentive. This sex-specific function of
QMP may have evolved from a sexually dimorphic signaling
mechanism derived from pre-social ancestors. If so,
there is potential for pre-social insects to respond to QMP,
and in a manner that is...
For honey bee and other social insect colonies the ‘queen substance’ regulates colony reproduction rendering workers functionally sterile. The evolution of worker reproductive altruism is explained by inclusive fitness theory, but little is known of the genes involved or how they regulate the phenotypic expression of altruism. We previously showed...
The study of social breeding systems has long incorporated molecular information. From the notion of 'genes for altruism' that underpins inclusive fitness theory to a now generation-long effort to uncover and interpret the molecular correlates to social variation, the field continues to assimilate ideas and tools from molecular biology. One common...
As genomic information becomes available for a growing number of social animals, so do opportunities to examine the genetic basis of social behavior. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of social insect research that is actively bridging the once-separate sub-fields of socio-and molecular-biology (Linksvayer et al., 2012; Libbrecht et al...
The relatively simple communication, breeding, and egg-making systems that govern reproduction in female Drosophila retain homology to eusocial species in which these same systems are modified to the social condition. Despite having no parental care, division of labor, or subfertile caste, Drosophila may nonetheless offer a living test of certain s...
A characteristic of eusocial bees is a reproductive division of labor in which one or a few queens monopolize reproduction, while her worker daughters take on reproductively altruistic roles within the colony. The evolution of worker reproductive altruism involves indirect selection for the coordinated expression of genes that regulate personal rep...
Appendix S3. Gene lists associated with each network cluster.
Appendix S4. Cluster 3 genes with reciprocal best‐hit matches to Drosophila.
Appendix S1. Honeybee cis‐motif data.
Appendix S2. List of sterility genes represented on the network.
A new species of open-air processional column termite is here described based on the soldier and worker castes from eight colonies in north Barito, central Kalimantan. Hospitalitermes nigriantennalis sp. n. is readily distinguished in the field from related Hospitalitermes spp. by the light brown to orangish coloration of the soldier head capsule t...
Termites are a relatively small but ancient group of insects that radiated from a
cockroach-like ancestor roughly 200 millions years ago (Eggleton, 2011). This
evolutionary persistence appears at odds however with the frailty of an individual termite.
Termites are soft-bodied, mostly blind, short-lived insects that are prone to desiccation
and dise...
As social insects, termites typically live in kin-based groups that are headed by a reproductive king and queen, but are otherwise populated by a large number of sterile workers and soldiers. Despite their sterility, these helper castes can gain indirect fitness by directing help toward reproducing relatives and defending against unrelated intruder...
It is well understood from inclusive fitness theory that genes are important to the evolution of social life. The honey bee Apis mellifera has played a central role as a model of gene discovery, but we do not yet have a full understanding of how genes coordinate worker self-sacrifice and reproductive altruism. In this review, we attempt to bring to...
Social living may burden the immune system by increasing susceptibility to contagion. Animals may, how-ever, evolve socially enabled defenses that limit their demographic vulnerability to disease. In this study we test for evidence of social immunity by exposing single versus grouped termites to a topical application of fungal spores, and measuring...
Termites are soft-bodied, mostly blind, make easy prey for ants and other insectivores, and are vulnerable to drying-up in open air. In addition, individual termites need to remain in contact with their colony mates for survival, or else perish alone. Despite these characteristics, termites are still here! But how can this be? How can individual te...
Insect sociality has evolved multiple times, and in each case has presumably involved a modification of regulatory mechanisms already present in solitary ancestors. It is not clear, however, how similar social and non-social taxa remain with respect to the cues and pathways used to regulate personal reproduction. In this talk we present a series of...
The evolution of reproductive self-sacrifice is well understood from kin theory, yet our understanding of how actual genes influence the expression of reproductive altruism is only beginning to take shape. As a model in the molecular study of social behaviour, the honey bee Apis mellifera has yielded hundreds of genes associated in their expression...
postulated the existence of 'genes underlying altruism', under the rubric of inclusive fitness theory, a half-century ago. Such genes are now poised for discovery. In this article, we develop a set of intuitive criteria for the recognition and analysis of genes for altruism and describe the first candidate genes affecting altruism from social insec...
In this study we test one central prediction from sociogenomic theory—that social and non-social taxa share common genetic toolkits that regulate reproduction in response to environmental cues. We exposed Drosophila females of rover (for
R) and sitter (for
s) genotypes to an ovary-suppressing pheromone derived from the honeybee Apis mellifera. Surp...
Sex differences in early development may play an important role in the expression of sexual size dimorphism at the adult stage. To test whether sexual size dimorphism is present in pre-emergent chinook salmon (Oncorhynchus tshawytscha), alevins were reared at two temperatures (10 °C and 15 °C) and sexed using the OtY1 marker on the Y-chromosome. Li...
We characterized the cold tolerance of natural populations of the Eastern subterranean termite (Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar) [Isoptera, Rhinotermitidae]) in southwestern Ontario, Canada. We measured cold tolerance in workers from six colonies of termites established from Pelee Island in Lake Erie, and Point Pelee National Park. The mean critica...
A key feature of eusocial insects is their reproductive division of labour. The queen signals her fecun-dity to her potentially reproductive daughters via a pheromone, which renders them sterile. In con-trast, solitary insects lack division in reproductive labour and there is no such social signalling or need for ovary-regulating pheromones. Noneth...
Social insects are among the world's most successful species at invading new environments. Their characteristic division of labor can influence their capacity to colonize new habitats, often with negative ecological or economic impact. The social Hymenoptera (i.e., ants, bees, and wasps), are well studied in this regard, but much less is known abou...
A conspicuous feature of honey bee social bio-logy is the division of labour between reproductive queens and functionally sterile workers. However, the sterility of workers is conditional and sensitive to genetic and envi-ronmental context. Despite this understanding, we do not yet know how effective differences in genotype versus differ-ences in c...
The Eastern subterranean termite Reticulitermes flavipes (Isoptera, Rhinotermitidae) is a cosmopolitan, structural pest that is the target of research into termite innate immunity. In this study, we use suppression subtractive hybridization to construct a normalized cDNA library of genes excessively expressed upon fungal infection. At 24 h postinfe...
Individuals living within social groups may benefit from the efficiencies of division of labour, but on the other hand render themselves vulnerable to socially transmitted disease. This cost to social living should promote cooperative barriers to disease transmission, especially in eusocial taxa where spatial and genetic proximity to nestmates are...
The Sunda region of Southeastern Asia is rich in termite fauna, but termites from this region have been poorly described. In this study, we described eight species from two diverse genera from this region, and from the family Termitidae. We describe Bulbitermes 4 spp. and Nasutitermes 4 spp. from new field collections. Where possible we examine ori...
A new species of nasute termite, Hospitalitermes krishnaisp. n., is described from soldiers and workers discovered in Lampung Province, Sumatra. This species can be distinguished from other related Hospitalitermes species from Southeast Asia by the anterior part of head capsule that is much smaller than the posterior part, head capsule that is mode...
Reticulitermes flavipes (Kollar) est connue dans les comtés Sud-ouest de l'Ontario comme étant un ravageur urbain. Très peu d'information est disponible cependant sur sa présence naturelle dans des environnements non-urbains en Ontario. Dans cette étude, nous rapportons l'existence d'une population de R. flavipes sur les rives du lac Erié dans le p...
Arising from M. A. Nowak, C. E. Tarnita & E. O. Wilson 466, 1057-1062 (2010); Nowak et al. reply. Nowak et al. argue that inclusive fitness theory has been of little value in explaining the natural world, and that it has led to negligible progress in explaining the evolution of eusociality. However, we believe that their arguments are based upon a...
Question: Is sexual dimorphism in shorebirds an adaptation to reduce resource competition between males and females? Hypothesis: If selection for resource partitioning between the sexes has contributed to dimorphism, then the degree of sexual size dimorphism (SSD) in resource-exploiting characters-such as those related to feeding should exceed that...
Ross H. Crozier died 12 November while working from his laboratory at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, after suffering a heart attack. He was 66.
A defining characteristic of eusocial animals is their division of labour into reproductive and nonreproductive specialists. Here, we used a microarray study to identify genes associated with functional sterility in the worker honey bee Apis mellifera. We contrasted gene expression in workers from a functionally sterile wild-type strain with that i...
The study of social life has long had an identity problem within evolutionary biology. For some, it is a special inter-est topic outside of the mainstream, while for others it has been central for generating and testing key ideas on the nature of selection. A new book that underscores social in-sects as models in the study of adaptive complexity wi...