You are what your mother eats: understanding mother-offspring interactions in tsetse vectors of disease.

产妇营养不良对后代健康有何影响？虽然这个问题长期以来一直与人类公共卫生领域相关，但人们对食物应激的跨代效应及其对病媒后代质量的影响知之甚少。该项目将重点研究采采蝇这一重要媒介中母亲的营养压力与后代质量之间的联系。采采症在人类中传播嗜睡病，在牲畜中传播nagana，在撒哈拉以南非洲地区引起巨大的社会和经济担忧。它们是不同寻常的疾病媒介：雌性只生下与母亲大小相同的活着的后代。因此，了解母体对该物种的投资对于预测它们饮食的变化将如何影响采采族数量和采采族传播疾病的风险至关重要。这名学生将使用最先进的稳定同位素标记追踪方法，追踪大量营养素(脂肪、蛋白质和脂肪)在活体采采草中从母亲到后代的命运。他们将通过提供模仿营养紧张的宿主的血餐来操纵采采族的饮食，并比较母亲和控制组的营养在几代人之间的分配情况。他们还将研究这种分配决定如何取决于后代自身的饮食质量。随后，学生将分析在津巴布韦收集的田间样本，以调查实验室中的营养压力水平如何反映野外观察到的水平。学生还将开发新的和生理模型，了解母亲如何在食物压力下调整自己或子女的生存分配，以及这种平衡如何依赖于母亲和孩子之间的冲突。通过与布里斯托尔大学和南非流行病学建模与分析中心的理论家合作，学生将有机会将这些模型整合到模拟中，以测试在干旱和营养不良的条件下，这种孕产妇分配如何影响人口对环境变化的反应。

How does maternal malnutrition impact offspring health? While this question has long been relevantin the field of human public health, little is known about transgenerational effects of food stress andits impact for offspring quality in disease vectors. This project will focus on the link between maternalnutritional stress and offspring quality in an important vector, the tsetse fly. Tsetse transmit sleepingsickness in humans and nagana in livestock, causing great societal and economic concern across subSaharan Africa. They are unusual disease vectors: females give birth to single, live offspring the samesize as the mother. Thus, understanding maternal investment in this species is key to predicting howchanges in their diet will impact tsetse populations and the risk of tsetse-borne disease. The studentwill use cutting-edge methods of stable isotope marker tracing to follow the fate of macronutrients(fat, proteins and lipids) from mothers to offspring in live-bearing tsetse. They will manipulate the dietof tsetse by providing bloodmeals which mimic nutritionally stressed hosts, and compare how mothersallocate nutrients across generations with those given control meals. They will also examine how suchallocation decisions depend on the quality of the diet offspring themselves experience. In tandem, thestudent will analyse field samples collected in Zimbabwe to investigate how the levels of nutritionalstress in the laboratory reflect those observed in the wild. The student will also develop newevolutionary and physiological models of how mothers adjust their allocation towards their ownsurvival or that of their offspring under food stress, and how this balance depends on conflict betweenmothers and young. By collaborating with theoreticians in the University of Bristol and the SouthAfrican Centre for Epidemiological Modelling and Analysis, the student will have the opportunity tointegrate these models into simulations to test how such maternal allocation shapes tsetse populationresponses to environmental change under conditions of drought and malnutrition.