Discovery

“Aedes is a beauty,” David Severson said. “Only an entomologist can love them and say: OK, that’s really a good-looking mosquito.”

Severson of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana is one of the researchers who have just published the genome of the mosquito species Aedes aegypti — best known as mass killer who spreads diseases, such as yellow and dengue fevers, in tropical and sub-tropical locales worldwide.

Yellow fever, common in West and Central Africa and in parts of South America, kills about 30,000 people annually. A vaccine has been around for decades, but the number of people infected has risen in the past 20 years, according to the WHO. Dengue occurs in about 100 countries in tropical areas of the world and kills about 25,000 people annually. There is no vaccine.

The genetic blueprint of Aedes is more complex than the one that carries malaria, and scientists are hoping to use the information to find ways to thwart the little killers. The genome is expected to guide efforts to develop insecticides or to create genetically engineered versions of this mosquito that are unable or less able to transmit the viruses that cause yellow fever and dengue fever.

The last mosquito species to be mapped is Anopheles gambiae (2002), which carries the parasite that causes malaria.The researchers said the genome for Aedes is about five times larger than the one for Anopheles. Both have roughly 16,000 genes, they said, but Aedes is loaded up with “junk DNA” and other stuff whose function is unclear.

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