Another feature of the interactions of ant and fungal genomes is the role in stress tolerance and cold adaptation of colonies, which can determine range expansion of symbioses under changing climate conditions. In a current project with North American fungus –farming ants I will be testing the hypothesis that either traits in the ants, fungi or synergistic traits were important during northward post-Pleistocene range expansion. This project involves approaches from evolutionary genetics, experimentation and landscape ecology where habitat preference and range expansion are modeled under climate change scenarios. This ongoing research is a collaborative project with researchers at UT Tyler, The University of Texas at Austin, and researchers in Uruguay and Germany, funded by NSF (DEB-1354629).