Socially transferred materials: why and how to study them

TREE review about socially transferred materials!

About a year after preprinting this exciting paper is finally out.

I have had this idea for nearly as long as I have been studying trophallaxis. Each time I look at a protein list of a social transfer I see certain genes popping up again and again. These commonalities haunted me – I felt like all of these social exchanges had so much in common. This had to be a new field of research!

In 2020 I acquired funding for a small CUSO workshop on Social transfers. With this I could assemble an excellent group of co-authors who are outstanding scientists and who are invested in this topic. Through highly fruitful and dynamic discussions that I led, we came to the ideas we put forth in this review.

I think this perspective will change the way people approach major aspects of biology. When we set out to write this, the idea was to define a field. Only time will tell if we managed!