BACKGROUND Rift Valley Fever (RVF) is weather dependent arboviral infection of livestock and humans. Population dynamics of mosquito vectors is associated with disease epidemics. In our study, we use daily temperature and rainfall as model inputs to simulate dynamics of mosquito vectors population in relation to disease epidemics. METHODS/FINDINGS Time-varying distributed delays (TVDD) and mu...

ARTICLES DISCUSSED: Chen, L., Xiao, Q., Shi, M., Cheng, J., Wu, J. Detecting Wolbachia strain wAlbB in Aedes albopictus cell lines. Journal of Visualized Experiments. (184), e63662 (2022). Haziqah-Rashid, A. et al. Determining temperature preference mosquitoes and other ectotherms. (187), e64356 Huang, D. Mosquito-associated virus isolation from field-collected mosquitoes. (186), e63852 Khoo, B...

The effects of the serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitor paroxetine (2×10(-5) mol l(-1)) on behavior of the larval mosquito Aedes aegypti are described. Four discrete behavioral states dominate larval behavior: wriggling, two distinct types of feeding, and quiescence. Feeding behaviors consist of foraging along the bottom of the container (substrate browsing), and stationary filter feeding whi...

BACKGROUND Identification of the source of mosquito blood meals is an important component for disease control and surveillance. Recently, matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) profiling has emerged as an effective tool for mosquito blood meal identification, using the abdomens of freshly engorged mosquitoes. In the field, mosquito abdomens a...

A cDNA for a midgut chymotrypsin, induced by a blood meal, has been cloned and sequenced from the mosquito Aedes aegypti. The 938 base sequence codes for a 268 amino acid protein, which contains an 18-residue signal peptide and a seven-residue activation peptide. The deduced amino acid sequence contains several features typical of chymotrypsin proteases, including the catalytic triad of serine ...

Female Anopheles quadrimaculatus adults were blood fed on 15 mixed breed dogs 4 h after the dogs were given oral dosages of ivermectin. Dogs were divided into 5 treatment groups of 3 dogs each, at 10, 500, 1,000, 2,500 micrograms/kg, and untreated. Additionally, An. quadrimaculatus were fed on lambskin-membranes containing blood drawn from one dog in each treatment group. Mosquitoes were allowe...

Vaccines that induce mosquito-killing (mosquitocidal) activity could substantially reduce the transmission of certain mosquito-borne diseases, especially vaccines against African malaria vectors, such as the mosquito Anopheles gambiae. To generate and characterize antimosquito immunity we immunized groups of mice with two individual A. gambiae midgut cDNAs, Ag-Aper1 (a secreted peritrophic matr...

An important variable in determining the vectorial capacity of malaria mosquito species is the degree of mosquito-human contact. This parameter can be affected by community sleeping behavior and the host-feeding habits of vectors. A cross-sectional study of 775 randomly selected inhabitants, including 385 Baluchi residents and 390 Afghani refugees, was conducted in a malarious area in Sabaz Dis...

In temperate regions, seasonal epidemics of many mosquito-borne viruses are triggered when mosquito populations shift from feeding on avian to mammalian hosts. We investigated effects of temperature on the timing of bird-to-mammal shifts using an 8 year dataset of blood-meals from a mosquito (Culex erraticus) in Alabama, USA. As expected, Cx. erraticus shifted from avian to mammalian hosts each...

Determining the dose of an arbovirus transmitted by a mosquito is important to design transmission and pathogenesis studies simulating natural infection. Several different artificial infection and transmission methods used to assess vector competence and to estimate the dose injected during mosquito feeding have not been fully evaluated to determine whether they accurately reflect natural trans...