Earlier this year, an international, interdisciplinary team led by Dr Adria LeBoeuf, group leader of the Laboratory of Social Fluids, was awarded a highly prestigious Human Frontier Science Program (HFSP) Research Grant. Here, Dr LeBoeuf describes the project and the significance of the grant.
“I feel 100% validated about my curiosity-driven type of science and extremely lucky,” said Dr LeBoeuf. “I am so excited about this because I have been pioneering this long-shot idea for the past 5 plus years.”
It is this kind of exceptionally bold research that HFSP funds, aimed at uncovering fundamental mechanisms of life. The programme prioritises high‑risk, high‑gain ideas that have the potential to reshape scientific thinking.
The funded project focuses on socially transferred materials (STMs), a concept introduced by Dr LeBoeuf in 2023. These are substances that are made in one body and transferred to another; examples include seminal fluids, egg yolks and milk. STMs allow the genome of one individual to influence the physiology and fitness of another.
With early support from the European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Dr LeBoeuf founded the Social Transfer Network, an international community of researchers who study a huge range of social transfers and socially transferred materials, from ant social feeding to pigeon crop milk and tsetse fly placentation.
The project funded by the HFSP grant brings together three leaders of this network: Dr LeBoeuf; Prof Joris Koene of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, who studies fertility‑manipulating “love darts” in hermaphroditic snails; and Prof Jenny Stynoski of the University of Costa Rica, whose work on poison frogs reveals them to be unexpectedly attentive parents.
The project will collect and analyse STMs from a wide range of species, identifying their protein components and building a comparative database. Using cutting‑edge proteomics and mass spectrometry imaging, they aim to discover where these molecules act in recipient bodies and whether evolution repeatedly deploys the same molecular “toolkit” to solve challenges such as fertility control, growth promotion, and microbial management.
“One thing that shocked me in my research on ant social regurgitation was that one of the most abundant proteins is also found in mammalian milk. And another is very close to something that's transmitted in fruit fly ejaculates.” Said Dr LeBoeuf. “This suggests that either there are common functions that get repeatedly co-opted by evolution. Or, there's something about building a bioactive fluid that needs to be transferred between bodies. So maybe there's a set of things that are used again and again.”
Dr LeBoeuf hopes the project will open new ways of thinking about how organisms interact, influence one another, and evolve together; “The possible implications are really extraordinary in terms of changing the way that we understand some quite fundamental things about how people develop and how our bodies interact.”
Beyond advancing fundamental evolutionary biology, their findings could have implications for agriculture, reproductive biology, and biomedicine, by revealing solutions to deliver bioactive materials between organisms.
For Dr LeBoeuf, the award is also personally significant. “Throughout my career I’ve often been told to narrow my focus and specialise in just one thing. But I believe my role in science is to connect very different systems and synthesise across them. The fact that HFSP is willing to fund that kind of blue‑sky, integrative science means the world to me.”