Apoptosis in the mosquito malaria vector Anopheles gambiae; development of an in vitro study system

• Main Author: Deaville, Pamela Jacqueline
• Published: Keele University 2010
• Subjects: 614.532
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.572428

Malaria is a health problem for 40% of the world's population and is recognised as the world's major tropical disease, killing 4.7 million people annually. In the study of the disease to date apoptosis has been shown to be involved in the trade off relationships between parasite and mosquito host. Reduced fecundity in the infected mosquito has been postulated to be one such result of infection of the mosquito by the parasite that is beneficial to the parasite, in that it not only provides nutrients but results in increased biting rates and thus transmission of the parasite and as such is a target for novel control measures. The fecundity reduction has been shown by previous researchers to be the result of increased apoptotic activity in the follicular epithelia of the ovary induced by the parasite. During this study an in vitro assay was developed in an Anopheles cell line to study the effects of apoptosis induction. Following UV induced apoptosis, RT PCR demonstrated a reduced expression of DAD1, an anti-apoptotic gene. DAD1 was also tested using non- parasitized and parasitized mosquito RNA. In order to gain a better insight into the apoptotic machinery in Anopheles a range of bioinformatic tools were used. Whilst DAD1 has been characterised as having a role in N-linked glycosolation a study of its sequence homology to the Bc12 family was undertaken to identify putative BH domains and further characterise the gene.