Data from: The microsporidian parasite Vavraia culicis as a potential late life-acting control agent of malaria
Microsporidian parasites are being considered as alternatives to conventional insecticides for malaria control. They should reduce malaria transmission by shortening the lifespan of female mosquitoes and thus killing them before they transmit malaria. As the parasite replicates throughout the mosquito’s life, it should have little detrimental effects on young mosquitoes, thus putting less selection pressure on the hosts to evolve resistance. Here we examined these expectations for the microsporidian Vavraia culicis on Anopheles gambiae Giles sensu stricto mosquitoes under varying environmental conditions. Infection by the microsporidian delayed pupation by 10%, decreased fecundity by 23% and reduced adult lifespan by 27%, with higher infectious doses causing greater effects. The decrease of the lifespan was mostly due to an increase of the mortality rate with age. Similarly, the parasite’s effect on mosquito fecundity increased with the mosquitoes’ age. Neither infection nor food availability affected juvenile survival. Thus, as V. culicis reduced the longevity of A. gambiae (s.s.), yet affected mortality and fecundity of the young mosquitoes only slightly, the microsporidian is a promising alternative to insecticides for effective malaria control that will impose little evolutionary pressure for resistance.
Keywords
Anopheles gambiae, Vavraia culicisItem Type | Dataset |
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Capture method | Experiment |
Date | 13 June 2011 |
Language(s) of written materials | English |
Creator(s) | Lorenz, L and Koella, JC |
LSHTM Faculty/Department | Faculty of Infectious and Tropical Diseases > Dept of Disease Control |
Participating Institutions | London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, London, United Kingdom, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom |
Funders |
Project Funder Grant Number Funder URI |
Date Deposited | 05 Nov 2015 14:51 |
Last Modified | 17 Jun 2025 10:16 |
Publisher | Dryad digital repository |
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info - Experiment 1: the effect of Vavraia on juvenile survival and adult longevity. Text file with column headers, column separated by commas
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subject - Data
- Creative Commons: Attribution
- Available under Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0
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info - Experiment 2: effect of Vavraia on age-specific fecundity. Text file with column headers; columns separated by commas
description - text/plain
- folder_info
- 2kB