Exploring the role of vitamin transport in insect models of disease vector biology

Vector-borne diseases of plants, livestock and humans are infections transmitted by arthropods feeding on host plants or animals. These diseases have huge worldwide economic, social and health costs.
Micronutrients such as vitamins are essential for all forms of animal life. However, many invertebrates thrive despite feeding exclusively on diets deficient in vitamins. Adequate nutrition is achieved via mutualistic relationships with heritable microbes which provide the micronutrients lacking in diet. This obligate nutritional symbiosis is most striking in insects feeding exclusively on vitamin deficient vertebrate blood or plant sap, insects that often act as vectors of human/livestock/plant diseases and have huge global economic impacts on crop production, food biosecurity, animal and human health.
Hypothesis: Molecular mechanisms of vitamin transport are fundamental for the persistence of endosymbiosis in obligate blood- and sap- feeding insects and, thus, the success of many invertebrate disease vectors.
Vitamin provision is central to endosymbiotic relationships and host insect success, but little is known about the molecular mechanisms involved in vitamin transport in insects. How are microbe-derived vitamins delivered to the bacteriocyte cytosol across the symbiosomal membrane, or to insect haemolymph across the bacteriocyte plasma membrane? By analysing recent genomic/transcriptomic information from blood- and sap-feeding insects, candidate vitamin transporters will be identified and characterised functionally.
Understanding the molecular basis of endosymbiotic relationships will shed light on a fundamental aspect of arthropod biology and underpin the development of novel disease vector control strategies centred on transporter biology.

Molecules, Cells and Industrial Biotechnology