Social Immunity: Cooperative Disease Defense in Insect Colonies
Event Details
- Type
- Friday Lecture Series
- Speaker(s)
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Sylvia Cremer, Ph.D., professor, Institute of Science and Technology Austria
- Speaker bio(s)
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Colonies of social insects are protected against disease not only by the individual immune systems of all colony members, but also by cooperative behaviors that reduce the risk of infection and disease transmission, thereby providing whole-colony protection via “social immunity”. As such, social insects like ants, bees and termites perform collective hygiene, mutual sanitary care and infection treatment. Little is known, however, how these behaviors are triggered in the individual insects and how they interplay to an effective disease control at the colony level. It is also still underexplored how the drastic reduction of pathogen fitness by social immunity affects pathogen adaptation to withstand not only the physiological immune systems, but also the colony-level defenses of their social hosts. Dr. Sylvia Cremer will present the integrated approach her team uses to understand how social immunity emerges from individual (inter-)actions and how it may shape disease evolution.
Sylvia Cremer received her Ph.D. at the University of Regensburg and was a postdoctoral scientist at the University of Copenhagen, as well as a Junior Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Berlin. After her habilitation at the University of Regensburg in 2010, she moved as an Assistant Professor to the ISTA, where she received tenure in 2015. She studies individual and social immunity in insect colonies, in particular the cooperative disease defense emerging in superorganismal ant societies. Her work combines behavioral and chemical ecology with evolutionary immunology, to understand common principles of the interplay of individual and collective disease defenses across biological levels.
FLS lectures will take place in Caspary Auditorium and virtually via Zoom. We recommend virtual participants log out of VPN prior to logging in to Zoom. Please do not share the link or post on social media. This talk will be recorded for the RU community.
- Open to
- Tri-Institutional