Dr Seirian Sumner

Summary

New levels of biological complexity evolve through the unification of independently replicating individuals into cooperative groups. The emergence of group living – sociality - is a major transition in evolution, and many of our planet’s most ecologically successful and invasive animals are social. Our research seeks to understand how biological complexity, primarily in the form of sociality, arises at the level of the genes and the interplay of genes, behaviour and the environment.

Social insects, where queens are dedicated egg-layers and their offspring are non- reproductive workers, epitomise the complexities of social evolution. Sociality has evolved independently at least 11 times in the Hymenoptera (bees, wasps and ants), resulting in societies that range widely in their degree of complexity, phenotypic plasticity and diversity. Our research exploits this remarkable radiation in order to understand how genomes produce phenotypic and behavioural diversity, determine what facets of this diversity account for an individual’s behaviour, and explore how this influences their ecology and robustness to the environment. We address this at proximate and ultimate levels through integrating genetics, genomics, transcriptomics, epigenetics with behavioural ecology on wild populations of non-model organisms. Our approach exploits the most recent advances in molecular techniques and state- of-the-art field monitoring technology.

Biography

• 2012-current: Senior Lecturer in Behavioural Biology, Bristol.
• 2004-2012: Research Fellow (RCUK & IoZ), Institute of Zoology, London.
• 2008: L'Oreal for Women in Science Fellowship Award, L'OrealUNSECO/Royal Society
• 2002-2004: Research Fellow in Molecular Evolution, Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Panama.
• 2000-2002: Postdoctoral researcher, Population Ecology Dept., Copenhagen University.
• 1996-1999: BBSRC Ph.D studentship, Dept. of Biology, University College London.
• 1993-1996: BSc (Hons). Zoology, University College London.

Activities / Findings

NEWS!

June 2013

URGENT CALL FOR A FIELD ASSISTANT: SOCIAL WASPS IN PANAMA. We are urgently looking for a field assistant to help with field work on social wasps in Panama. NB closing date is nominally 20th June 2013, but if no suitable candidates are found by then, the position wlll remain upen until filled .

For details see "field asisstantpanama 2013.pdf on this page, or email Seirian.sumner@Bristol.ac.uk and/or Emily.Bell@ioz.ac.uk

Student funding awarded! Many congratulations to PhD student Emily Bell, who has been awarded a pre-doctoral reserach fellowship from the Smithsonian Tropical research Institute to conduct her work on phenotypic plasticity in tropical wasps.

Fieldwork in Panama: Seirian, PhD student Emily Bell and assistant Robin Southon head out to Panama for a field season on Polistes canadensis at the Smithsonian Research Institute, Panama. This is Emily's final field season, so fingers crossed the wasps behave! Robin is squeezing in a second stint as Emily's assistant, before he starts his NERC funded PhD with us in October.

May 2013

New funding awarded: We are delighted to receive further support from NERC's NBAF-Wallingford bioinformatics nodes to continue our work on developing pipelines for analysis of differential gene expression from RNAseq data. This work is supporting PhD studnet Claire Asher in the final stages of her PhD project on transcriptomics in dinosaur ants. This is a collaboration with Dr Mesude Bicak at Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) and Dr Afsaneh Maleki at the University of Sheffield.

Postdoc relocation: Postdoc Stephanie Dreier (http://www.zsl.org/science/ioz-staff-students/dreier,1728,AR.html) has now relocated from Institute of Zoology, London for a 6 month position in our lab. Stephanie is working on various genetics projects on Polistes and bumblebees, including some exciting social network analyses of wasp dominance interactions. 

April 2013

New funding awarded: NERC Omics discipline hopping grant. We are delighted to announce that Chris Wyatt will be joining our group this month as a NERC funded training position (Omics Call) exploring the relationships between transcription, protein synthesis and phenotype in social insect queen and worker castes. He will be working along- side Dr Gary Barker, in the School's transcriptomics unit and Prof Julian Gough, in Computer Science. Chris has a MSc in bioinformatics from Imperial College.

New NERC CASE PhD studentship awarded: Assessing current and future impacts of invasive ants on ecosystem services. This will form the basis of a new collaboration with Kew Royal Botanical Garden as CASE partner (Dr Rosemary Newton and Dr John Dickie). Adam Devenish will be taking up this PhD position in October. 

March 2013

New publication: Congratulations to PhD student Claire Asher on the publication of some of the first of her behavioural work on the dinosaur ant!

Asher, C, Nascimento, F, Sumner, SR & Hughes, W 2013, ‘Division of labour and risk taking in the dinosaur ant, Dinoponera quadriceps (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)’. Myrmecological News, vol 18., pp. 121-129

New publication: Congratulations to PhD student Emily Bell on her first wasp publication!

Bell E, Sumner S: Ecology and Social Organisation of Wasps. In Encyclopedia of Life Sciences (eLS), vol. online March 2013. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd; 2013.  http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470015902.a0023597/abstract;jsessionid=A90AB34515F1BC569A8CBF391A69CCF7.d02t04

Feb 2013 

New publication: Our transcriptome study on Polistes canadensis is now out!

Transcriptome analyses of primitively eusocial wasps reveal novel insights into the evolution of sociality and the origin of alternative phenotypes. Pedro G Ferreira, Solenn Patalano, Ritika Chauhan, Richard Ffrench-Constant, Toni Gabaldon, Roderic Guigo and Seirian Sumner. Genome Biology 14, R20. doi:10.1186/gb-2013-14-2-r20 http://genomebiology.com/content/pdf/gb-2013-14-2-r20.pdf

A poster on this work can be found here  

Memberships

Organisations

School of Biological Sciences

Bristol Centre for Complexity Sciences

Groups

• Behaviour, Sensory and Neurobiology
• Ecological and Evolutionary Processes

Labs

• Behavioural Biology
• Ecological and Evolutionary Genetics

Links

• Twitter profile

Recent publications

• Asher, C, Nascimento, F, Sumner, SR & Hughes, W 2013, ‘Division of labour and risk taking in the dinosaur ant, Dinoponera quadriceps (Hymenoptera: Formicidae)’. Myrmecological News, vol 18., pp. 121-129
• Ferreira, PG, Patalano, S, Chauhan, R, Ffrench-Constant, R, Gabaldon, T, Guigo, R & Sumner, S 2013, ‘Transcriptome analyses of primitively eusocial wasps reveal novel insights into the evolution of sociality and the origin of alternative phenotypes’. Genome Biology, vol 14., pp. R20
• Lengronne, T, Leadbeater, E, Patalano, S, Dreier, S, Field, J, Sumner, S & Keller, L 2012, ‘Little effect of seasonal constraints on population genetic structure in eusocial paper wasps’. Ecology and Evolution, vol 2., pp. 2615-2624
• Patalano, S, Hore, TA, Reik, W & Sumner, S 2012, ‘Shifting behaviour: epigenetic reprogramming in eusocial insects.’. Current Opinion in Cell Biology, vol 24., pp. 367-73
• Colgan, TJ, Carolan, JC, Bridgett, SJ, Sumner, S, Blaxter, ML & Brown, MJ 2011, ‘Polyphenism in social insects: insights from a transcriptome-wide analysis of gene expression in the life stages of the key pollinator, Bombus terrestris.’. BMC Genomics, vol 12., pp. 623
• King, AJ, Narraway, C, Hodgson, L, Weatherill, A, Sommer, V & Sumner, S 2011, ‘Performance of human groups in social foraging: the role of communication in consensus decision making.’. Biology Letters, vol 7., pp. 237-40
• Riddell, CE, Sumner, S, Adams, S & Mallon, EB 2011, ‘Pathways to immunity: temporal dynamics of the bumblebee (Bombus terrestris) immune response against a trypanosomal gut parasite.’. Insect Molecular Biology, vol 20., pp. 529-40
• Albert, S, Gätschenberger, H, Azzami, K, Gimple, O, Grimmer, G, Sumner, S, Fujiyuki, T, Tautz, J & Mueller, MJ 2011, ‘Evidence of a novel immune responsive protein in the Hymenoptera.’. Insect biochemistry and molecular biology, vol 41., pp. 968-81
• Sumner, S, Kelstrup, H & Fanelli, D 2010, ‘Reproductive constraints, direct fitness and indirect fitness benefits explain helping behaviour in the primitively eusocial wasp, Polistes canadensis.’. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society, vol 277., pp. 1721-8

View complete publications list in the University of Bristol publications system