Vaishnavi Kardale, Bioinformatics Centre, Savitribai Phule Pune University
According to WHO, 390 million dengue infections are registered in the world every year. Dengue virus (DENV) spreads through a mosquito vector Aedes aegypti. This mosquito is restricted to regions with high human settlements, where it breeds in man-made containers inside and outside housings. The increase in dengue cases worldwide is the effect of globalization. It is expected that by 2050, about 50% of the world population would live alongside Aedes aegypti.
As a result of global warming and climate change, the global mean temperature is expected to rise and the mosquito vector would be exposed to a temperature beyond their upper thermal limit.
Control of Dengue:
Dengue infection causes fever, weakness, sometimes requiring hospitalization but may also result in death. At the moment we do not have any effective vaccine or medication for the treatment of dengue. The primary strategy for reducing the number of infections is by vector control. Traditional methods to control the mosquito population is by using insecticide and larval habitat reduction.
A newer method that has been adopted widely is by using endosymbiotic bacterium Wolbachia pipentis. Wolbachia limits the replication of the DENV virus inside the host mosquito. The bacterium is passed down to the offspring, making this a low-maintenance approach in disease control. So, Wolbachia transinfected Aedes aegypti is being released globally into the wild population. The mosquito’s body temperature is dependent on external environmental conditions. Global warming can lead to thermal stress in the mosquito. A recent study at Pennsylvania State University was carried out to study the effects of rising temperature on the vector mosquito and endosymbiotic bacteria.
The study:
By taking a mosquito that is already suffering a stress response due to DENV and Wolbachia, the researchers expected that the mosquito would be less equipped to deal with additional thermal stress. To study their hypothesis, the researchers placed the infected mosquito in a vial and then dipped it in a water bath at 42o C. The time the mosquitos took to become immobilized was analysed by them. They then compared this time to the time taken by uninfected mosquitoes.
What did the study find?
The result of this exercise showed that the mosquitoes infected with DENV were immobilized three times faster than uninfected mosquitoes when placed in a hot-water bath. While the mosquito that was infected with Wolbachia became immobilized four times faster. The researchers further suggested that DENV and Wolbachia did not have an additive response. This means that a mosquito infected with both DENV and Wolbachia would not immobilize faster as expected. At higher temperatures, the virus may replicate faster but this is countered by the mosquito’s thermal tolerance.
So although global warming may reduce the spread of DENV infected mosquitos, it will affect its biological control agent Wolbachia as well.
Also read: Variability in multi-omics profiling: A cohort study
References:
- Ware-Gilmore, F., Sgrò, C. M., Xi, Z., Dutra, H. L. C., Jones, M. J., Shea, K., Hall, M. D., Thomas, M. B., & McGraw, E. A. (2021). Microbes increase thermal sensitivity in the mosquito Aedes aegypti, with the potential to change disease distributions. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, 15(7), e0009548. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0009548
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Author info:
Vaishnavi Kardale is a master’s student at the Bioinformatics Centre, Savitribai Phule University. She is interested in protein folding mechanisms and wants to study them further.
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