IAH studentship: Molecular components of sexual development in Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus

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Management of arboviral diseases relies heavily or solely on the use of insecticides. Their effectiveness is threatened by emergence of insecticide resistance. Alternative mosquito control methods are urgently needed. One proposed method is the sterile insect technique. It relies on repeated massive releases of sterile males, whose mating with native females produces no offspring, leading to a crash of target populations. SIT has proved spectacularly successful in elimination of serious agricultural pests. Its use for mosquito control is hampered by lack of adequate methods of sorting males from females. Technological advances opened prospects for the development of transgenic Aedes strains that would produce conditional male-only generations suitable for SIT. Approaches depend on the identification of sex-specific genes that could serve as targets to induce female lethality or masculinisation (sex reversal to phenotypic males). Elimination of females at the embryonic stage would drastically reduce costs of male production for releases. The sex determination pathway is expected to provide optimal targets. In insects sex is determined by a primary signal in early embryos that triggers a life-long expression of cascade of sex-specifically spliced genes whose products control developmental processes. Elements of cascade have been identified only in several non-drosophilid species. Comparisons of sequences revealed an astonishing variety of primary signal genes and high evolutionary lability of other subordinate genes. In all studied species, knockdown of genes located upstream of dsx led to female masculinization or death at the embryo stage. In mosquitoes only dsx has been described. Key question: Can we identify other sex determination genes and dissect their function in two major arbovirus vectors, Aedes aegypti and A albopictus, using comparative genomics tools, state-of-the-art methods of male and female transcriptome profiling, RNAi-based experimental approaches?

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