Bzzzz... wack!

One of the huge perks to my job is the vast amount of speeches taking place daily about genomics related to a lot of really interesting topics, including but not limited to mental illness, heart disease and infectious diseases. I am really thankful for this environment, where intellectual curiosity is the expectation and attending these talks is encouraged, in addition to taking the time to eat your lunch (if it's not being provided at the talk) and have a life outside of work. This is sort of a long entry, but your brain likes to read things longer than a text message ;-)

Today's lunchtime talk was by one of the scientists researching mosquitos and malaria. Mosquitoes are a common frustration at many summer gatherings, often forcing the retreat indoors or at least behind screens, but lucky for us in this part of the world, they typically don't carry malaria with them.

SO, I learned all about transmission of malaria, which literally means "bad air" in Italian, because for a long time, no one knew how it spread. Mosquitoes, specifically Anopheles gambia, bite an infected animal to feast on a blood meal that will eventually help them hatch their eggs. Plasmodium falciparum, the malaria-causing parasite, infiltrates the gut of the A.gambia along with the blood, then migrates to their salivary glands. From here, they then infect other animals after feasting on another blood meal, roughly 10-12 days later. Eradicating malaria is complicated by a myriad of factors, mostly involving the mutating genomes which contribute to resistance to drugs and insecticides we are using to cure and protect people.

Interestingly enough, there has been no observation of resistance to quinine, the natural cure for malaria found in the bark of the cinchona tree. Crazy, right? Here we are, scrambling to find targets on their genome to develop insecticides and drugs that will squelch malaria every time we see an increase due to resistance to our previous "cure-all" and there is just this thing in nature that cures malaria in its natural state.

Another interesting factoid: different species of mosquitoes like to eat their blood meals from different animals, often having a ranked preference of their commonly available options. Turns out their kind of picky eaters.

AND they are picky maters! Females like to "swarm mate", meaning they observe this cloud of male mosquitoes showing of their aerobatic skills and then swoop in on the one they want. If you want a female to mate with a specific male (to witness a certain genome in their offspring) and just put the two of them in a little mating cage, she will oftentimes entirely refuse due to lack of options. Who wants to put in all the effort of hatching eggs if the male can't even fly well?

At a recent outdoor gathering where mosquitoes descended, Courtney, Ben and I pondered why mosquitoes biting people don't spread HIV, or if they did, and we had not heard of it. Since I had this mosquito expert sitting in the same room, I descended, much like these pests, after his speech to ask this rather unrelated question.

Between his knowledge of mosquitoes and others' knowledge of viruses, and HIV specifically, it was determined that there is no way the very sensitive human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) could survive in the chemical environment of the gut of a mosquito after it had been ingested as part of a blood meal, nor had any of them heard of any instances of mosquitoes spreading HIV. Phew...

Knowledge dropped!