Spotlight
Research: Flying Syringes
| USF News
Mosquitoes are nasty little creatures. They carry horrendous diseases like malaria and yellow fever, and devastating illnesses like St. Louis encephalitis.
Now researchers at USF say there's another reason to hate mosquitoes — they carry around hundreds of viruses, many which have never been seen before.
Virus hunters Terry Fei Fan Ng, a recent USF PhD graduate, and Mya Breitbart, an assistant professor in USF's College of Marine Science, made the discovery using a technique developed by Breitbart. The technique allows DNA to be extracted from viruses, sequenced and compared against databases of known viruses. It allows researchers to more rapidly identify viruses not known to exist.
"Most studies of viruses in mosquitoes search for specific, well-known pathogens," says Breitbart, a biological oceanographer. "Our study is fundamentally different because it uses metagenomic sequencing to provide an overview of the diversity of the total viral community — including viruses that infect the many hosts the mosquitoes feed upon, as well as those viruses that infect the mosquitoes themselves."
The researchers' findings were published in June in the journal, PloS One. The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at San Diego State University, the Genome Institute of Singapore and the Wildlife Disease Labs at the San Diego Zoo's Institute for Conservation Research.
The researchers looked at three species of mosquitoes captured at three different times and places in San Diego County in a trap baited with dry ice. Viruses were extracted from the mosquitoes' bodies, purified, sequenced and then compared to known virus DNA sequences.
The scientists found a series of animal viruses, including viruses related to herpes and pox virus. In one mosquito they found papillomaviruses. They believe the mosquito picked up the papillomaviruses from the host's skin during feeding. Some 80 percent of normal human skin harbors papillomaviruses, they say, but the virus has never before been detected in mosquitoes.
While the study makes no conclusions about whether or how mosquitoes might spread the viruses, it breaks new ground in understanding the wide variety of viruses that are present in mosquitoes, and could lead to new tests to study how the viruses are transmitted.