Vision in mosquitoes

While male mosquitoes are nectar foragers, females exhibit a biting behaviour with a blood meal giving them the necessary energy for oviposition. Due to the transmission of various diseases, host seeking in mosquitoes is intensively studied and a study revealed the importance of vision in the red part of the light spectra (Alonso San Alberto et al., 2022). Furthermore, we know that photosensitive proteins (i.e., opsins) wildly diversified at the origin of mosquitoes and a high number of copy were kept under positive selection (Feuda et al., 2021).

Here we thus try to investigate differencies in opsin gene expression between male (non biting) and female (biting) of the Malaria mosquito (Anopheles gambiae).

To do so we are combining bulk transcriptomics in the eye of mosquitoes to detect wide differencies, and explore the pattern of expression of genes of interest using Hybridization chain reaction (HCR).

This project started as Harini Suresh Master’s project.

References

Alonso San Alberto, D., Rusch, C., Zhan, Y., Straw, A.D., Montell, C. & Riffell, J.A. (2022) The olfactory gating of visual preferences to human skin and visible spectra in mosquitoes. Nature Communications, 13, 555.

Feuda, R., Goulty, M., Zadra, N., Gasparetti, T., Rosato, E., Pisani, D., et al. (2021) Phylogenomics of Opsin Genes in Diptera Reveals Lineage-Specific Events and Contrasting Evolutionary Dynamics in Anopheles and Drosophila. Genome Biology and Evolution, 13, evab170.