Biology subjects

Rund, S. S. C.

Publications and source records attributed to Rund, S. S. C..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2018

Minimum Information for Reusable Arthropod Abundance Data (MIReAAD)

Introduction Introduction Discussion Conclusion References Arthropods play a dominant role in the dynamics of practically all natural and human-modified terrestrial ecosystems1-3, and have significant economic and health effects. For example, certain insects provide significant economic benefits (e.g. pollination) exceeding $57 billion a year to the United States alone4. Meanwhile, invasive insects cost an estimated $70 billion dollars per year globally5 and insect pests may reduce agricultural harvests by up to 16%, with an equal amount of further losses of harvested goods6. Particularly noteworthy is a subset of arthropods that are disease vectors, transmitting pathogens to and between animals as well as plan ...

ecology↗

bioRxiv2018

Adaptive periodicity in the infectivity of malaria gametocytes to mosquitoes

That periodicity in the biting activity of mosquito vectors explains why malaria parasites have evolved rhythms in cycles of asexual replication in the hosts blood was proposed almost 50 years ago. Yet, tests of this hypothesis have proved inconclusive. Using the rodent malaria Plasmodium chabaudi, we examine rhythms in the density and infectivity of transmission forms (gametocytes) in the hosts blood, parasite development inside mosquitoes, and onwards transmission.Moreover, we control for the confounding effects of rhythms in mosquito susceptibility. We reveal that at night, gametocytes are twice as infective to mosquitoes, despite being less numerous in the blood. This enhanced infectiousness at night interacts with mosquito rhythms to increase sporozoite burdens by almost four-fold when mosquitoes feed during their day. Thus, daytime blood-feeding (e.g. driven by the use of bed nets) may render gametocytes less infective, but this is compensated for by the greater susceptibility of mosquitoes.

microbiology↗

bioRxiv2017

Costs and benefits of sub-lethal Drosophila C virus infection

Viruses are major evolutionary drivers of insect immune systems. Much of our knowledge of insect immune responses derives from experimental infections using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Most experiments, however, employ lethal pathogen doses through septic injury, frequently overwhelming host physiology. While this approach has revealed a number of immune mechanisms, it is less informative about the fitness costs hosts may experience during infection in the wild. Using both systemic and oral infection routes we find that even apparently benign, sub-lethal infections with the horizontally transmitted Drosophila C Virus (DCV) can cause significant physiological and behavioral morbidity that is relevant for host fitness. We describe DCV-induced effects on fly reproductive output, digestive health, and locomotor activity, and we find that viral morbidity varies according to the concentration of pathogen inoculum, host genetic background and sex. Notably, sub-lethal DCV infection resulted in a significant increase in fly reproduction, but this effect depended on host genotype. We discuss the relevance of sub-lethal morbidity for Drosophila ecology and evolution, and more broadly, we remark on the implications of deleterious and beneficial infections for the evolution of insect immunity.

evolutionary biology↗

bioRxiv2016

Creating a National Vector Surveillance System: Integrated mosquito trap data and digital epidemiology

According to the World Health Organization, every year more than a billion people are infected with vector-borne diseases worldwide. There are no vaccines for most vector-borne diseases. Vector control, therefore, is often the only way to prevent outbreaks. Despite the major impact of vectors on human health, knowledge gaps exist regarding their natural population dynamics. Even the most basic information--such as spatiotemporal abundance-- is not available. Mosquitoes transmit malaria and the viruses causing Yellow Fever, West Nile, Dengue, Chikungunya, and Zika in the Americas. The Americas have a long history of mosquito control efforts, including the unsustained but successful Aedes aegypti eradication initiative. In the US, municipalities have independently created agencies for mosquito control and monitoring. We propose that the ensemble of US mosquito control agencies can, and should, be used to develop a national--and potentially international--system for Cross-Scale Vector Monitoring and Control (CSVMaC), in which local level monitoring and control efforts are cross-linked by unified real-time data streaming to build the data capital needed to gain a mechanistic understanding of vector population dynamics. Vectors, and the pathogens they transmit, know no jurisdictions. The vision of CSVMaC is, therefore, to provide data for (i) the general study of mosquito ecology and (ii) to inform vector control during epidemics/outbreaks that impact multiple jurisdictions (i.e., counties, states, etc.). We reveal >1000 mosquito control agencies in the US with enormous troves of data that are hidden among many data silos. For CSVMaC, we propose the creation of a nationally-coordinated open-access database to collate mosquito data. The database would provide scientific and public health communities with highly resolved spatiotemporal data on arboviral disease vectors, empowering new interventions and insights while leveraging pre-existing human efforts, operational infrastructure, and investments already funded by taxpayers.

ecology↗