Blood in a Mosquito’s Belly Could Reveal How Diseases Spread.

Keven is a doctoral student at Michigan State University, and leader of the mosquito-catching team. Over the last few summers, John Keven has spent many long nights under the stars in Papua New Guinea. For 12 hours at a time, he’ll scour a giant green net set up between thatched huts, looking for resting mosquitoes every 20 minutes. When he spots one with his headlamp, he quietly approaches, extending a long rubber tube to suck the bug off the net. Then he blows it from the tube into a container for analysis—in a lab halfway around the world. The undigested blood inside the Anopheles punctulatus mosquitoes Keven collects is going to the research team at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, which uses DNA markers to identify what the insects feed on through the night—information that could help predict how they spread disease. The team’s recent testing, published last month in the journal PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, revealed that this type of mosquito feeds on a wider range of species than expected, potentially influencing the way it transmits malaria. The bugs feast on the humans in the villages, but also the pigs, dogs, mice and even marsupial species in the area. But this study is only one of a growing number of attempts to characterize mosquito behavior by analyzing the blood they suck. The recent emergence of Zika virus, entomologists say that matching the DNA fingerprint of human blood inside mosquitoes with individuals could help shed light on how these insects spread disease—and who is most vulnerable. “The extent to which mosquitoes don’t bite on everyone the same might actually be important when you think about who’s most important to vaccinate,” says Steve Stoddard, an entomologist at San Diego State University who has studied mosquito feeding behaviors. Data from this type of work could influence how researchers mathematically model the possible future spread of diseases carried by mosquitoes. In 2014, Stoddard and his colleagues analyzed the feeding behaviors of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, the species that is a prime suspect in the current spread of Zika virus. This species can carry dengue, too, and it likes to hang around inside human dwellings, making it even riskier. The scientists collected mosquitoes from inside 19 households in Iquitos, a Peruvian port city on the Amazon, along with cheek swabs to capture DNA from 275 residents. read more here http://www.wired.com/2016/04/blood-mosquitos-belly-reveal-diseases-spread/