You might guess it'd be tough to extract saliva from a mosquito. And you'd be correct. Yet, because mosquitos spread disease via saliva, it's critical to sample and study.
University of KansasSep 5 2024 You might guess it'd be tough to extract saliva from a mosquito. And you'd be correct. Yet, because mosquitos spread disease via saliva, it's critical to sample and study.
Collecting saliva from these mosquitoes is challenging due to the small sample size, which is a common limitation in such experiments. Our collaborators with the USDA Agricultural Research Service put the mouth of the mosquitoes into a tube, then stimulate salivation and collect the saliva." These include West Nile, yellow fever, dengue fever, Japanese encephalitis and other viruses that can harm or kill people, animals and plants. The USDA has an interest in veterinary applications for the findings, but Saraf's work could underpin therapies for people as well.
"At our mass spectrometry core at KU, we use shotgun proteomics, nanoscale liquid chromatography coupled with tandem mass spectrometry, or nLC-MS, which requires only a minimal amount of protein in the nano-gram range, making it ideal for these types of biological samples," Saraf said. "The sensitivity of our setup is crucial because, without it, we would need much larger protein quantities.
According to the KU researcher, her lab's shotgun approach of analyzing proteomes is robust and more sensitive than other methods, affording much more detailed time-course studies. To date, Saraf's team has worked with uninfected mosquitoes to establish baseline data. Once inactivation protocols are approved and authorized, the work will include samples from Biosafety Level 2 arbovirus infected mosquitoes.
Mosquito Yellow Fever Agriculture Laboratory Malaria Mass Spectrometry Protein Proteome Proteomics Research Spectrometry Virus
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