Sociogenomics of conflict and cooperation during colony founding in the fire ant Solenopsis invicta

Acknowledgments The authors would like to thank members of the Grozinger Lab for commenting on an earlier version of the manuscript and Sarah Kocher (Harvard) and Naomi Altman (Penn State) for providing assistance with the statistical analysis. The authors would also like to thank Alex McMenamin for performing the validation of candidate gene expression. Many thanks to Craig Praul and his team at the Penn State Genomics Core Facility for performing all the steps to prepare RNA samples for microarrays and for providing assistance during RNA extraction and data analysis. A special thanks to Eileen Carroll, Chin-Cheng Yang (Scotty) and all the undergraduate research assistants in the Shoemaker Lab that provided extraordinary support, help and advice during field work and laboratory experiments at the USDA-ARS, CMAVE in Gainesville, Florida. Funding: This study was funded by US Department of Agriculture AFRI Award 2009-35302-05301 to DS and CMG. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Peer reviewedPublisher PD