Secrets to a Successful Hunt: Integrating Genomes, Chemistry and Behaviour in Neotropical Solitary Wasps

Aculeate wasps are understudied relative to their more popular cousins, bees and wasps, and yet are more biodiverse than bees and wasps combined. This is particularly so for the solitary wasps, who represent over 90% of all aculeate wasp species and exhibit remarkable diversity in their ecology and life-history, especially in their hunting behaviours.

Solitary wasps are also the ancestors of social wasps, bees and ants; despite the significant contributions over the last decade of sociogenomics to our understanding of social evolution in insects, we lack genomic resources for solitary wasps - the critical 'starting blocks' of social evolution. Solitary wasps also provide important, but largely overlooked, ecosystem services as top predators of arthropod populations making them key to maintaining equilibrium in biodiversity.

Solitary wasps are also prey-specialists and so fill a different niche to the (generalist) social wasps: they provide untapped potential to study genomic sensory mechanisms in the evolution of hunting. The only non-social wasp genome available is for the parasitic jewel wasp, which is not an Aculeate (stinging wasp) and exhibits very specialised life history; we lack any genome sequences of solitary (non-parasitic) hunting wasps.

The biodiversity of wasps in Brazil is unrivalled and although there is a strong legacy of wasp research in Brazil, genomic resources for Brazilian insects are largely lacking, and Brazilian entomologists have poor access to state-of-the-art genomic tools. This project will generate the essential fundamental genomic tools and training to kick-start new fields of study in the evolutionary and ecological importance of these biodiverse insects, seeding long-term collaborative projects between UK and Brazilian (BR) researchers.

Our collaborative team will integrate state-of-the-art genomic and bioinformatic techniques (UK partner) with expertise in natural history and sensory ecology (BR partners) to exploit the unrivalled biodiversity of Brazilian solitary wasps and position BR scientists as pioneers in the untapped field of solitary wasp genomics. In doing so, we will generate the first genome sequences for solitary wasps.

This proposal also takes the first steps in utilising these genomic resources to address an outstanding question in insect ecology: what is the genomic basis of predator-prey evolution? By integrating genomic expertise of the UK partner with the ecological and chemical expertise of the BR partners, this project will spawn a new area of research, led by international teams of BR & UK scientists.

The UK partner will train Brazilians in the critical analytical tools required to determine the molecular basis of specialist hunting behaviours in solitary wasps, including genome annotations and comparative genomics methods. With high-quality, chromo-some-level genomes in hand, we will together conduct gene evolution analyses of genes associated with chemical perception - odorant binding receptors and olfactory receptors, and determine how genomic processes have been integrated in the evolution of prey specificity.

Finally, in addition to generating these essential resources, and training Brazilian researchers into genomic methods, this project will provide a conceptual and empirical springboard of a long-term collaborations between BR & UK scientists, placing us as pioneers in the molecular studies of solitary neotropical wasps.