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.

蚊子可以成为几种不同病原体的宿主，例如寨卡病毒，西尼罗河病毒和登革热病毒。这些病毒正越来越多地威胁到全球健康。了解这些病毒如何影响其蚊子宿主对于开发准确的风险评估以及刺激病毒的监视和控制至关重要。宿主及其病原体通常因其最佳生存策略而发生冲突。因此，一些病原体发展了操纵宿主行为的方法。一个例子是登革热病毒，可降低蚊子的咬合效率。这会导致感染的蚊子必须更频繁地咬人才能达到相似的血液补充，从而导致登革热病毒的扩散增加。由于蚊子的最佳温度，在许多情况下，它的病原体温度偏好也可能是有益的。因此，该项目的目的是研究病毒如何以及在何种程度上可以操纵其蚊子载体的温度偏好。这项研究具有三个目标：首先，通过感染蚊子来进行操纵的时间表，范围和程度，并让它们在两腔仪器中的不同温度之间进行选择。其次，通过调整现有温度外部孵育阶段模型来模拟温度偏爱操作的效果。最后，使用RNA干扰技术和物理操纵来确定操纵机制。这项研究将提供对病毒蚊子操纵的有价值的新见解，并使我们能够创建蚊子狂欢的风险模型，可用于集中蚊子监视和控制工作。