Podcast: Christopher Pull talks about “No mercy for sick ants”
IST Austria alumnus Christopher Pull was interviewed for episode 45 of the eLife podcast. At the invitation of The Naked Scientists, he talked about “No mercy for sick ants”. In a recent eLife paper, Sylvia Cremer’s group had found out that ants kill colony mates infected with deadly diseases when they are unable to prevent them from falling sick in the first place. In doing so, the ants protect their colony from the outbreak of an epidemic. When fighting diseases, ant colonies show a remarkable similarity with the immune system that protects the organism of vertebrate animals. Christopher Pull was a PhD student in the Cremer group at IST Austria from 2012 to 2017. He is now a postdoctoral researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London.
Check out the podcast and paper at https://elifesciences.org/podcast/episode45
