Study creates a mosquito family tree to better understand disease transmission and host choice.
Researchers at North Carolina State University and global collaborators have mapped the mosquito's tree of life, a major step toward understanding important traits, such as how the insects choose their hosts, feed on blood and spread disease. The findings will help researchers make better predictions to model disease transmission and understand what makes some mosquitoes better disease carriers than others.
"A lot of research goes into the important mosquitoes and there's not much known about the incredible mosquito diversity across the globe," Wiegmann said."We now have the tools to sample genetic information more rapidly and very thoroughly. And so the time was right to take a big stab at putting the disease vectors and the well-known mosquitoes into the context they evolved in.
"The genomic data confirms that blood feeding evolved very early, before some vertebrate groups, like mammals and birds, were flourishing on Earth," Wiegmann said."Mosquitoes evolved right along with them with a new feeding strategy of developing hypodermic needles for mouths and feeding on blood in order for females to have plenty of protein to develop mature eggs."
Funding for the research came from the National Science Foundation under grant DEB-17534376. John Soghigian, Charles Sither, Silvia Andrade Justi, Gen Morinaga, Brian K. Cassel, Christopher J. Vitek, Todd Livdahl, Siyang Xia, Andrea Gloria-Soria, Jeffrey R. Powell, Thomas Zavortink, Christopher M. Hardy, Nathan D. Burkett-Cadena, Lawrence E. Reeves, Richard C. Wilkerson, Robert R. Dunn, David K. Yeates, Maria Anice Sallum, Brian D. Byrd, Michelle D. Trautwein, Yvonne-Marie Linton and Michael H.
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