Back to the Future: Quantifying Wing Wear as a Method to Measure Mosquito Age.

Vector biologists have long sought the ability to accurately quantify the age of wild mosquito populations, a metric used to measure vector control efficiency. This has proven difficult due to the difficulties of working in the field and the biological complexities of wild mosquitoes. Ideal age grading techniques must overcome both challenges while also providing epidemiologically relevant age measurements.

Three Immunocompetent Small Animal Models That Do Not Support Zika Virus Infection.

Zika virus (ZIKV) is a mosquito-borne flavivirus that is primarily transmitted to humans through the bite of an infected mosquito. ZIKV causes disease in infected humans with added complications of Guillain-Barré syndrome and birth defects in infants born to mothers infected during pregnancy. There are several large immunocompetent animal models for ZIKV including non-human primates (NHPs).

Nootkatone Is an Effective Repellent against and .

We tested a nootkatone product for insecticide activity against the most prominent vectors of Zika virus (ZIKV), , and We tested the permethrin-resistant (PERM-R) Vergel strain of and the permethrin-susceptible (PERM-S) New Orleans strain of to determine if insecticide resistance affected their susceptibility to nootkatone. Bottle bioassays showed that the PERM-S strain (New Orleans) was more susceptible to nootkatone than the confirmed permethrin-resistant (PERM-R) strain, Vergel. The strain ATM-NJ95 was a known PERM-S strain and Coatzacoalcos permethrin susceptibility was unknown but proved to be similar to the ATM-NJ95 PERM-S phenotype.

Characterizing and Quantifying Arbovirus Transmission by Using Forced Salivation and Analysis of Bloodmeals.

Arbovirus transmission studies are dependent on the ability to estimate the titer of virus transmitted from infectious mosquitoes to a host. There are several methods for estimating virus titer in mosquito saliva, including (1) using forced salivation (FS) whereby the infectious mosquito's proboscis is forced into a capillary tube containing media to collect and test their saliva for virus, and (2) by quantifying virus expectorated into host tissues or into the blood contained in an artificial feeder immediately after blood feeding. We studied FS and bloodmeals to estimate and compare titers of Zika virus and chikungunya virus transmitted by the mosquito vector .