Insect are primary vectors of a large number of human diseases including malaria, sleeping sickness, Chagas disease, Chikungunya fever, Dengue, West Nile encephalitis, Yellow fever and others, which takes a huge toll on human health world-wide. The principle goal of my research is to understand how insect vector populations and parasites interact in field conditions, in both natural and perturbed environments such as vector control at an ecological scale. In this proposal, I outline an engineering based approach towards new high-throughput tools capable of autonomous field measurements in vector populations such as mosquitoes which is complimentary to other biophysical/physiological studies in my lab. The tools are designed to specifically fill the gap in our knowledge of insect vector ecology, which is currently based on error-prone and laborious methods such as manual capture and dissection. In the work described here, we will invent and deploy high-resolution field measurements to rigorously challenge our ecological understanding of how insect-parasite population structures responds with common perturbations such as seasonal variations (where is malaria in the winter) or vector control interventions (release of wolbachia infected mosquitoes in the wild or pesticide application). High throughput tools proposed here will enable a new era in ecological measurements at a scale never possible before. We will initially focus our efforts on three specific but general purpose tools: 1) We wil create a high-throughput microfluidics tool for autonomous measurement of infection rates in a given population of adult mosquitoes for West Nile, malaria and Dengue in field conditions. 2) A citizen-science based massively parallel global mapping tool for monitoring mosquito species in field conditions using cell-phones and spectrogram based species identification. Our experiments will test long standing hypothesis in medical ecology of malaria including seasonal variations in epidemics, influence of harsh weather on adult populations and spatial and temporal dynamics of adult vector population The powerful toolkits developed here will have applications in medical field ecology, entomology, evolution of insecticide resistance, dynamics of vector-borne disease transmission and public health surveillance and potential early warning systems for epidemics.
Parasitic insects are extremely important both ecologically and medically. With the burden of a million deaths just due to malaria every year after more than 100 years of research in this field, stands as a testament to how difficult this problem of malaria eradication actually is. By bringing in new ideas from different fields, including information technology, applied physics and insect physiology - we aim to develop high-throughput tools to enable precision measurements and perturbations of diseases vectors responsible for human diseases.
