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

蚊子可能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。这些病毒正在对全球健康构成越来越大的威胁。了解这些病毒如何影响蚊子宿主，对于发展准确的风险评估和虫媒病毒监测和控制至关重要。寄主和病原体在寻求最优生存策略时经常会发生冲突。正因为如此，一些病原体进化出了操纵宿主行为的方法。登革热病毒就是一个例子，它会降低蚊子的叮咬效率。这导致受感染的蚊子不得不更频繁地叮咬，以达到类似的血液循环，从而导致登革热病毒的传播增加。病原体控制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，该项目的目的是调查病毒如何以及在多大程度上可以操纵其蚊媒的温度偏好。这项研究有三个目标：首先，评估感染蚊子并让它们在两室装置中选择不同温度的操纵的时间尺度、范围和程度。第二，通过采用现有的温度外在潜伏期模型来模拟温度偏好操纵的影响。最后，利用RNA干扰技术和物理操纵来确定操纵的机制。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可用于集中蚊子监测和控制努力的蚊子行为感知风险模型。

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.