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PBT

Student Competition Poster

Category: Student Competition Poster

Grad Poster: PBT, Physiology, Biochemistry, and Ecology

Metabolic snapshot: Using metabolomics to compare near-wild and colonized Aedes aegypti

Poster Student Competition
Since its detection in 2013, the Yellow Fever mosquito (Aedes aegypti) has spread rapidly throughout California. This species is a primary vector of dengue, chikungunya, and Zika viruses. In an effort to study the physiology of this mosquito and identify putative insecticide targets, we hope to understand how wild mosquitoes differ from our colonized reference strain, Rockefeller (Rock) and to determine if any of these differences may be associated with their resistance to pyrethroid type insecticides. We used high-throughput metabolomics to investigate the metabolomic profiles of recently colonized Californian Aedes aegypti relative to that of the Rock strain lab colony raised under equivalent conditions. Metabolomics is a high throughput method that provides a snapshot of the metabolite composition (ie. fats, sugars, amino acids, neurotransmitters) in an organism to reveal information about a diverse array of physiological processes. Metabolites were isolated from multiple homogenized pools of whole mosquitoes via chromatography and analyzed by mass spectrometry to obtain compound identifications and relative abundances via three panels dedicated to identification of primary metabolites, lipids and biogenic amines. The resulting multivariate datasets were queried to identify strain specific differences in metabolite abundance via bioinformatic analyses. Comparison of the metabolomes from the two strains revealed significant differences across an array of compounds. We hope to use this data as a foundation to understand the mechanisms that underlie these differences and if they are associated with the pyrethroid resistance phenotype in these mosquitoes.