Abstract
Mosquito-borne diseases are responsible for more than a million human deaths every year. Modern mosquito control strategies such as sterile insect technique (SIT), release of insects carrying a dominant lethal (RIDL), population replacement strategies (PR), and Wolbachia-based strategies require the rearing of large numbers of mosquitoes in culture for continuous release over an extended period of time. Anautogenous mosquitoes require essential nutrients for egg production, which they obtain through the acquisition and digestion of a protein-rich blood meal. Therefore, mosquito mass production in laboratories and other facilities relies on vertebrate blood from live animal hosts. However, vertebrate blood is expensive to acquire and hard to store for longer times especially under field conditions. This review discusses older and recent studies that were aimed at the development of artificial diets for mosquitoes in order to replace vertebrate blood.
Highlights
Disease-vectoring mosquito species can acquire and transmit pathogens that cause human diseases such as malaria, Dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, Zika, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis, and lymphatic filariasis [1,2]
We hypothesize that the formulation and use of artificial diets for mosquito rearing can help reduce costs, effort, and eliminate live animal use for mosquito culture in the long term
Once yolk proteins are synthesized by the mosquito fat body, they are released into the hemolymph, the insect open circulatory system, and deposited in oocytes via receptor-mediated endocytosis [46,48]
Summary
Disease-vectoring mosquito species can acquire and transmit pathogens that cause human diseases such as malaria, Dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, Zika, West Nile, Japanese encephalitis, and lymphatic filariasis [1,2]. Innovative mosquito control methods such as sterile insect technique (SIT), release of insects carrying a dominant lethal (RIDL), population replacement strategies (PR), and Wolbachia endosymbiont-driven techniques offer “green”, eco-friendly alternatives to insecticides [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22] The implementation of these biocontrol methods requires the use and release of sterilized or genetically modified mosquitoes that are generated and released in mass amounts in order to interact with and/or replace wild populations. Public Health 2016, 13, 1267 supporting these novel approaches to control mosquito populations and mosquito-borne diseases by reducing costs and alleviating the problems associated with the use of vertebrate blood (see below)
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