Adaptive potential of hybridization in mosquito species
Wednesday, June 25, 2014 - 13:20
in Biology & Nature
A natural experiment created by insecticidal pressure to determine how the most important malaria vectors -- A. gambiae s.s. and A. coluzzii -- respond rapidly to environmental change has been conducted by researchers. Researchers sequenced the genomes of individual wild mosquitoes of each species from southern Ghana. The results reveal that transfer of a major insecticide resistance mutation resulted in replacement of over 3 million surrounding DNA bases of one to the other. This is especially significant because the two species are very closely related and the region replaced is one of relatively few areas of their genomes that are substantially different.