ANTI-VeC's 4th annual meeting – webinar 3 link + information pack

Our 4th annual meeting concludes today with a final set of four scientific talks by Fatalmoudou Tandina, Lina Fina, Marcos Georgiades and Alvaro Acosta-Serrano. The session will be chaired by Dr Tony Nolan and will finish with an overview of ANTI-VeC's achievements and outline of what comes next for the network.

Webinar 3 will take place today via Zoom at 13:00-15:30 GMT. 

Webinar 3 link:
https://uofglasgow.zoom.us/s/91213999375?pwd=bVlWSTlvZC9HUG0rNktLaG14ZHhWUT09
Passcode: 811652

Please click the above link just before 1pm. You may be held in a waiting room for a short time until the organisers are ready to allow attendees into the meeting.

Crucially, if you don't have Zoom installed on your computer or other device, please download the software in advance of the meeting. A link to do so is in the information pack.

This webinar's information pack contains key information about how to connect to the webinars, and can be downloaded here.

4th ANTI-VeC Annual meeting – Webinar 3 programme and preview

The impact of feeding methods on Anopheles mosquito midgut microbiota and P. falciparum infection rates

Parasites invading the mosquito midgut can encounter environmental variation important in determining infectiousness of the parasite to the mosquito. Of particular recent interest is the mosquito gut microbiome, which is majorly altered during blood feeding. Current experiments looking into the importance of host microbiome and more generally measuring parasite transmission success typically use mosquitoes fed on an artificial membrane system that may not adequately represent natural skin feeding. The project sets out to establish whether mosquito feeding mode alters mosquito microbiota and infectivity of the parasite to mosquitoes. Fatalmoudou reports on results from the study carried out in Faladié, a rural village in the commune of N'djiba, Kati cercle (Koulikoro) in Mali, which compared direct skin feed infections that fully recapitulate the natural infection process to the gold standard membrane feeding assay using blood from the same donor. This will be followed by the study of the microbiota on the mosquito’s midguts preserved at 24 hours post-feeding and the positive midgut by the 16S sequencing, to be carried out at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Fatalmoudou Tandina, University of Science, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako (USTTB): Fatalmoudou Tandina is an Entomologist and currently group leader of the Entomology sub-unit at the Malaria Research Training Centre (MRTC) at the University of Sciences, Techniques and Technologies of Bamako (USTTB), Mali. Her research interests are in medical entomology and its impact on public health. Her thesis on Infectious Disease Contagion and Prevention in medical entomology, focused on the development and use of innovative tools such as MALDI-TOF (Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation – Time of Flight) for the mosquitoes identification, their blood meal and their digestive microbiota. She is investigator and coordinator of the entomological aspect of the EDCTP funded project titled “Clinical evaluation of Artesunate + Amodiaquine + Atovaquone-Progunanil tri- therapy for malaria treatment in African children”.

Into the Wild: New Models for Community Engagement with Mosquito Releases

Lina reports on their project involving partners at King’s College London, University of Oxford, Pan Africa Mosquito Control Association (PAMCA), University of Witwatersrand and Ifakara Health Institute. The project brings together social scientists, public health practitioners and entomologists to explore opportunities for effective stakeholder engagement on research and implementation of novel alternative interventions for malaria control and elimination. This presentation will shed light on key steps and lessons learned from a series of stakeholder engagement activities done in Tanzania.
 

Lina Finda, Ifakara Health Institute: Lina Finda is a researcher at Ifakara Health Institute (IHI) in Tanzania. She received her BSc in Biochemistry from Western Washington University in 2010. In 2014 she received a Masters of Public Health degree with dual concentrations in Maternal and Child Health, and Health Education and Promotion from Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. She is about to graduate from her PhD in Public Health from University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. Her research, based in Tanzania, focuses on developing strategies for stakeholder engagement on novel technologies for malaria control. Lina joined IHI in 2015, and since then she has been working on several projects to investigate the magnitude and drivers of malaria transmission, exploring the interactions between malaria vectors and humans and to develop novel strategies for stakeholder engagement in malaria control and elimination.

In the eye of the swarm: Mapping the acoustic landscape of mosquito disease vectors

Acoustic interactions between male and female mosquitoes are important for their reproductive biology. Courtship, and subsequent mating, occurs in swarms that form shortly after sunset where males identify females by their sexually dimorphic flight tones. The aim of this project was to record individual flight tones produced in swarms of Anopheles mosquitoes from within the swarm i.e. from the ‘acoustic point of view’ of a participating mosquito. Using an array of microphones, they first recorded from swarms under field and semi-field conditions in Ifakara, Tanzania. Controlled experiments were then performed in environmental chambers in the laboratory. These recorded flight tones allow for mapping the acoustic landscapes of male and female mosquitoes that will inform future lure/trap designs and help build novel tools to assess the acoustic fitness of mosquitoes marked for field release programmes.

Marcos Georgiades, University College London: Marcos Georgiades is a PhD student funded by the London Interdisciplinary Doctoral Programme (LIDo). His research project is a collaboration between the animal flight lab of Professor Richard Bomphrey (Royal Veterinary College), and the insect-hearing biomechanics lab of Professor Joerg Albert (University College London). The beating wings of mosquitoes produce, simultaneously, aerodynamic forces, and the acoustic signal (the buzz) that guides their reproductive behaviours. Marcos investigates mosquito aerodynamics, mosquito acoustics, and the interdependency of the two, using an array of methods ranging from computational fluid dynamics to behavioural assays. He has in the past worked as a Bioinformatician on several mosquito hearing-related projects.

Should the tsetse symbiont S. glossinidius be engineered to control African trypanosomiasis?

The Sodalis project blends field and lab data to answer some key questions on how a symbiotic bacterium living in tsetse can influence trypanosome establishment in the fly. Mr Peter Odhiambo, working alongside Dr Dan Masiga (icipe), has been screening wild-caught flies in Kenya for the presence of Sodalis in each fly. He, and Dr Lee Haines (LSTM), have perfected the technique for isolating Sodalis from tsetse flies, and have new isolates awaiting screening in our phenotypic bioassays. Transcriptomics have been used to assess how the tsetse responds when fed a single Sodalis cocktail and what genes may be involved in increasing the vector competence of this fly. Furthermore, they have also compared two Sodalis genomes, a parasite-enhancing (tsetse symbiont) and non-enhancing (environmental isolate), to identify what genes are only present in the tsetse symbiont. Combined, their data is helping them move closer to understanding how this symbiont alters the fly’s midgut to become more parasite susceptible.

Álvaro Acosta-Serrano, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM): Álvaro Acosta Serrano obtained his PhD in Molecular Parasitology from the Federal University of São Paulo. He was a Post-doctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, and then a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the University of Dundee and University of Glasgow. In 2008 he joined the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, where he is currently a Reader in the Department of Vector Biology. Research in his group focuses on fundamental aspects of the biology of kinetoplastid parasites and their vectors, and on developing molecular tools to control and prevent disease transmission. He currently serves as academic editor for several journals and advises on several scientific committees and networks.