Medkour et al. demonstrate that lipids of the sphingomyelin class in mosquito saliva facilitate the transmission of multiple flaviviruses. These salivary sphingomyelins reconfigure lipid homeostasis i...

Aedes mosquitoes transmit viruses of global health concern through blood feeding. While biting, mosquitoes inject viruses but also saliva factors that modulate feeding and potentially viral transmission. However, studying this interplay is limited by our ability to quantify saliva release. Here, we developed a transgenic Aedes aegypti line that secretes fluorescent markers in saliva, enabling visualization of probing sites on human skin explants and quantification of salivation. Saliva secretion remained robust under diverse physiological conditions but was significantly reduced upon Zika or chikungunya virus infection. Nevertheless, virus release did not correlate with levels of saliva factors, suggesting decreased salivation does not lower chances of viral transmission. Our results bring perspective to the previously described increase in probing behavior in infected mosquitoes, indicating it may be caused by lower release of saliva factors. Thus, the negative impact of infection on salivation may have been selected to facilitate virus transmission.

Climate change is driving outbreaks of tropical diseases across the continent.

For the Malay translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.

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European Union's Horizon Europe.

Overexpression of small antibodies in mosquito midguts inhibits infection by dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and Mayaro viruses. Co-expressing small antibodies with Dcr2 further enhances arbovirus transmis...

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The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the primary vector for dengue virus (DENV), which infects millions of people annually. Variability in DENV susceptibility among wild Ae. aegypti populations is governed b...

Have you already signed up for our newsletter? 📥 https://lnkd.in/dB3AMiyX Flavivirus infections pose significant challenges to public health. Our project…

Zika virus (ZIKV) outbreaks have raised major global health concerns recently, yet reported outbreaks are rare in Africa, where ZIKV was first discove…