Mosquito gut ecosystem: an ecological genomics perspective

Mosquitoes are ecologically associated with various organisms during their life history. Both male and female mosquitoes live on plant nectars as major natural resources for carbohydrates and amino acids, which power flying and mating behavior. Female mosquitoes take vertebrate blood for egg production. In addition to the association with plant and vertebrate organisms, mosquitoes also accommodate a symbiotic microbiome in the gut. The metagenomic ecological interactions play critical roles in various mosquito life traits, including behavior, fecundity and immunity. Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) based ecological genomics is an emerging approach to elucidate the ecological interactions at genome level. Here we report a bioinformatics pipeline to extract genomic information from mosquito NGS datasets to determine the taxonomic identities of mosquito associated organisms. We applied the pipeline to analyze the NGS data from wild mosquito specimens of Anopheles gambiae and An. arabiensis collected in Africa and An. sinensis collected in China. The pipeline recognized sequences from human and cow mitochondrial genome, tomato chloroplast genome, Plasmodium, microsporidia and bacteria. The findings of these organisms depicted a picture of ecological connections of mosquitoes with plants, vertebrates, pathogens, and symbiotic microbes.