A conflict of interests: How do viruses manipulate their mosquito-vector to increase their own transmission?

利益冲突：病毒如何操纵蚊子媒介来增加自身的传播？

• 批准号: 2749566
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: University of Liverpool
• 依托单位国家: 英国
• 项目类别: Studentship
• 财政年份: 2022
• 资助国家: 英国
• 起止时间: 2022 至 无数据
• 项目状态: 未结题
• 来源: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=studentship-2749566
• 关键词: conflict; interests; How; do; viruses

Mosquitoes can be hosts for several different pathogens such as Zika virus, West Nile virus, and dengue virus. These viruses are becoming increasing threats to global health. Understanding how these viruses affect their mosquito host is essential for the development of accurate risk assessments and arbovirus surveillance and control. Hosts and their pathogens are often in conflict for their optimal survival strategy. Because of this some pathogens have evolved ways to manipulate their hosts behaviour. An example of this is dengue virus which reduces the mosquito's biting efficiency. This causes the infected mosquito to have to bite more frequently to reach similar blood repletion, which results in an increased spread of dengue virus. It could also be beneficial for a pathogen to manipulate mosquito temperature preference as the optimal temperature for the mosquito and their pathogen is in many cases not the same. The aim of this project is therefore to investigate how, and to what extent, viruses can manipulate the temperature preference of their mosquito-vector. This research has three objectives: First, asses the timescale, range, and extent of the manipulation by infecting mosquitoes and letting them choose between different temperatures in a two-chamber apparatus. Second, to model the effects of temperature-preference manipulation by adapting existing temperature extrinsic-incubation-period models. Finally, determine the mechanism of manipulation using RNA interference techniques and physical manipulation. This research will provide valuable new insights into viral mosquito manipulation and will allow us to create mosquito-behaviour-aware risk models that can be used to focus mosquito surveillance and control efforts.

蚊子可以是几种不同病原体的宿主，如寨卡病毒、西尼罗河病毒和登革热病毒。这些病毒正日益成为全球健康的威胁。了解这些病毒如何影响其蚊子宿主对于制定准确的风险评估和虫媒病毒监测和控制至关重要。寄生虫和它们的病原体经常为了它们的最佳生存策略而发生冲突。正因为如此，一些病原体已经进化出操纵宿主行为的方法。其中一个例子是登革热病毒，它会降低蚊子的叮咬效率。这导致受感染的蚊子必须更频繁地叮咬才能达到类似的血液补充，从而导致登革热病毒的传播增加。病原体操纵蚊子的温度偏好也可能是有益的，因为蚊子和它们的病原体的最佳温度在许多情况下是不同的。因此，该项目的目的是研究病毒如何以及在多大程度上可以操纵其蚊子媒介的温度偏好。这项研究有三个目标：首先，通过感染蚊子并让它们在两室装置中选择不同温度来评估操作的时间尺度，范围和程度。第二，通过调整现有的温度外孵化期模型来模拟温度偏好操纵的影响。最后，使用RNA干扰技术和物理操作来确定操作的机制。这项研究将为病毒蚊子操纵提供有价值的新见解，并将使我们能够创建蚊子行为感知风险模型，可用于集中蚊子监测和控制工作。