Virginia Tech Research
An African mosquito species with a deadly capacity to transmit malaria has a perplexing evolutionary history, according to discovery by researchers at the Fralin Life Science Institute at Virginia Tech.
Closely related African mosquito species originated the ability to transmit human malaria multiple times during their recent evolution, according to a study published this week inPLoS Pathogens by Igor Sharakhov, an associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, and Maryam Kamali of Tehran, Iran, a Ph.D. student in the department of entomology.
The discovery could have implications for malaria control by enabling researchers to detect and target specific genetic changes associated with the capacity to transmit a parasite.
Malaria causes as many as 907,000 deaths each year, mostly among children in sub-Saharan Africa. Anopheles mosquitoes, which bite mainly between dusk and dawn, transmit human malaria by spreading Plasmodium parasites that multiply in the human liver and infect red blood cells. But of the more than 400 species of mosquito belonging to the Anopheles genus, only about 20 are effective vectors of human malaria, according to the World Health Organization.
The most dangerous of these is the Anopheles gambiae mosquito species, one of seven in the Anopheles gambiae complex, which was thought to have recently evolved the ability to transmit malaria. However, Virginia Tech scientists' discoveries suggest that this species is actually genetically linked to an older, ancestral lineage.
Scientists used chromosomal analysis to compare gene arrangements for mosquitoes both inside and outside the Anopheles gambiae family to trace the evolutionary connections............
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