Project description:Plasmodium sporozoites are injected, in addition to saliva, into animal hosts when a female Anopheles mosquito takes a blood meal. The molecular components of saliva that interact with Plasmodium during this process are poorly characterized. Here we collected Plasmodium sporozoites directly from salivating Anopheles mosquitoes and looked for the presence of vector proteins that could be interacting with the parasites during transmission for further characterization.
Project description:Senescence is a biological phenomenon experienced by all living eukaryote organisms. Genome-wide gene expression associated with aging has been explored in model organisms such as Drosophila melanogaster and Caenorhabditis elegans, but this has not been well understood in African malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae. Gene expression profiling using DNA microarray allows for simultaneous study of changes in mRNA levels for thousands of genes. This study examined genome-wide gene expression during aging process in An. gambiae. The influence of blood feeding on gene expression was also examined. The data can be used to further our understanding of mosquito senescence and identify biomarkers for mosquito age grading. Transcriptional profiles of Anopheles gambiae female mosquitoes were determined at 1, 4, 10, 19 and 28 days post adult eclosion. Additionally mosquitoes that had access to blood meals were compared to those that were maintained with access to only water and sugar.
Project description:Anopheline mosquitoes frequently take multiple blood meals in a single gonotrophic cycle. In this study we determined patterns of gene expression in Anopheles gambiae females blood fed twice within the first gonotrophic cycle.
Project description:The Anopheles gambiae midgut harbors bacteria that proliferate upon a blood feed. We used microarrays to examine the midgut gene expression response at early stages (3hours) after an artifitial meal containing heat killed bacteria. Anopheles gambiae G3 mosquitoes 5-6 day-old were fed BSA (20% in PBS with fresh 10 mM sodium bicarbonate) with or without heat killed E. coli (equivalent of 2.5 ml of 0.8 OD) . Three pools of 10 mosquito midguts were dissected after 3h and processed for microarray analysis of gene expression.
Project description:Malaria is as one of the most debilitating mosquito-borne global health burdens. While much of the malaria and mosquito-borne disease attention have focused on Africa, South East Asia accounts for a sizable portion of the malaria global burden. Moreover, about 50% of the Asian malaria incidence and deaths have been from India. The completion of genome sequence of Anopheles stephensi, a major malaria vector in Asia, offers new opportunities for global health innovation, not to mention for progress in deciphering the vectorial ability of this mosquito species at a molecular level. Moving forward, tissue-based expression profiling would be the next obvious step in understanding gene functions of Anopheles stephensi. We report here the first study, to the best of our knowledge, on transcriptomic profile of four important organs of an adult female Anopheles stephensi mosquito (midgut, Malpighian tubules, fat body and ovary). In all, we identified over 21,000 transcripts corresponding to more than 12,000 gene loci from these four tissues. This study provides the tissue-based expression profiles of majority of annotated transcripts in Anopheles stephensi genome, and the dynamics of alternative splicing in these tissues. Understanding the transcript expression and gene function at the tissue level would immensely help in enhancing our knowledge of this important vector and decipher the putative role of these tissues. This knowledge might in turn provide the basis of selection of candidates for future studies on vectorial ability and novel molecular targets to intercept malaria transmission.
Project description:Complex gene flow boundaries among sympatric Anopheles vector mosquito populations revealed by genome-wide SNP genotyping.<br><br>Normalized data is provided in archive E-MTAB-338.additional.zip on the FTP site for this experiment.
Project description:Anopheline mosquitoes frequently take multiple blood meals in a single gonotrophic cycle. In this study we determined patterns of gene expression in Anopheles gambiae females blood fed twice within the first gonotrophic cycle. 1 condition, 3 replicates per condition, Affymetrix internal controls
