The underlying theory of malaria transmission and the transmission of other diseases by mosquito vectors is that germs enter the female mosquito as part of a blood meal and then develop further in the mosquito before moving to the salivary glands of the animal. When the mosquito bites again, it injects a little saliva that has an anti-coagulant effect prior to having its next blood meal. It is this miniscule saliva injection that supposedly carries the pathogen, plasmodia in the case of malaria, and viruses for West Nile, yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis, etc., from the mosquito to the victim.
And of course, this has become a subject of research. In news-medical.net last week an article was published about research by Anita Saraf, Director of the Mass Spectrometry & Analytical Proteomics Laboratory at the University of Kansas on this topic. Dr Saraf describes how with a new two-year grant of $250,000 per year from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility, she and her team are currently analysing these samples of non-infectious mosquito saliva in the fight against “arboviruses” a term used for viruses spread by arthropods like mosquitos.
At present they are collecting baseline data to identify the proteins normally present in mosquito saliva (described in the article as shotgun proteomics to analyse biological samples) that can be compared in the future with saliva from mosquitos supposedly infected with the target disease.
Saraf states that “We’ll identify differences and changes at the proteome level by comparing the control and infected samples at different stages. The goal is to determine the protein changes that occur, as these can potentially serve as candidates for vaccine development. We’ll first need to select candidates, which is why we are using controls under the same conditions without infection. We must carefully load equal amounts of protein from both to ensure accurate comparisons -; essentially, we’ll be able to compare ‘apples to apples.”