Video: Inside the Insectary: How BU Scientists Study Diseases from Mosquitoes—without Getting Bitten
Researchers at BU’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories are using the Aedes aegypti mosquito to study diseases like dengue, West Nile, and Zika
Inside the Insectary: How BU Scientists Study Diseases from Mosquitoes—without Getting Bitten
Inside the Insectary: How BU Scientists Study Diseases from Mosquitoes—without Getting Bitten
It’s an unwanted ritual of summer: vainly splatting at mosquitoes as they nibble your exposed legs and arms, then enduring days of irritated itching from inflamed bites. For most Americans, it’s just an annoyance, but for many around the world, those bites can be deadly. Globally, 400,000 people die from malaria every year, another 40,000 from dengue—both diseases are primarily transmitted by mosquitoes.
At Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories (NEIDL), researchers are looking at ways to halt mosquito-borne viruses—known as arboviruses—by studying the role of mosquito saliva proteins in facilitating disease transmission.
They’re especially interested in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes—sometimes called the yellow fever mosquito—which is typically found in tropical and subtropical climates. This disease-carrying insect is now finding a home across much of the southern United States, and is expected to fly even farther north as the climate warms, potentially becoming a regular nuisance in New England and Canada by 2100.
At NEIDL, up to 2,000 mosquitoes are held in an Arthropod Containment Level 3 (ACL-3) insectary, with researchers having to make their way through a series of containment barriers to get to their lab to study the insects. Infected mosquitoes are locked in double cages, while mesh and plastic cover every lab entrance—researchers also keep bug zappers on hand as an added precaution. The biosafety measures allow the researchers—suited in Tyvek lab coats and N95 respirators—to study viruses commonly transmitted by Aedes aegypti, like chikungunya, dengue, West Nile, yellow fever, and Zika.
“Without specific medication to treat arbovirus infection—and the only effective arboviral vaccine is the yellow fever vaccine developed in 1937—the prevention of arboviral transmission is limited,” says Fabiana Feitosa-Suntheimer, a NEIDL senior research scientist and ACL-3 insectary manager. If we can better understand “the mechanism in which mosquito saliva interacts with arbovirus during transmission to the host,” she says, it may give antivirals and vaccines something new to target: take down the saliva, stop the spread. “I hope that finding new mosquito saliva proteins with prophylactic potential will contribute tremendously to the control of arbovirus diseases in humans.”
In the video above, go inside the insectary to see how the researchers are learning more about mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.
This research is supported by the National Institutes of Health and NEIDL. Feitosa-Suntheimer is the lead researcher on the project; Florian Douam, a BU School of Medicine assistant professor of microbiology, is a coinvestigator.
Comments & Discussion
Boston University moderates comments to facilitate an informed, substantive, civil conversation. Abusive, profane, self-promotional, misleading, incoherent or off-topic comments will be rejected. Moderators are staffed during regular business hours (EST) and can only accept comments written in English. Statistics or facts must include a citation or a link to the citation.