You give me fever

James Gathany / CDC

The paper:

V. Nene et al., “Genome sequence of Aedes aegypti, a major arbovirus vector,” Science, 316:1718–23, 2007. (Cited in 100 papers)

The finding:

Five years after scientists sequenced the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute and the University of Notre Dame released the genetic blueprint of a second mosquito, Aedes aegypti, the species that spreads yellow and dengue fevers. With two mosquito genomes, researchers may develop genomics-based explanations of mosquito behavior and the pathogens they transmit, says Peter Atkinson of the University of California, Riverside.

The expansion:

Over the 150 million years since the mosquito lineages split, the Ae. aegypti genome ballooned to five times the size of A. gambiae’s. This enlargement was driven by a surge of transposable elements, which make up around half of Ae. aegypti’s 1.4 billion base pairs. “It’s still an open question as to why Aedes has so many” transposable elements, says Notre Dame’s David Severson, who led the study.

The contrast:

Imperial College London’s George Christophides showed that immune signaling pathways in the two mosquito genomes are fairly similar, but highly diverged from the fruit fly’s (Science, 316:1738–43, 2007). “These immunity differences might be explained by the insects’ different diets and pathogen exposures,” Christophides says.

The accomplices:

Researchers have recently sequenced three more human disease vectors—another mosquito, Culex quinquefasciatus; a body louse, Pediculus humanus; and a tick species, Ixodes scapularis—and created a web portal called VectorBase (www.vectorbase.org) to interrogate all five disease-carrier genomes.