Genetic Arms Race Between Mosquitoes and Humans Uncovered

It turns out that mosquitoes and humans may be in an evolutionary arms race. Each time you put on bug spray in the summer, you're striking at these insects-and they're adapting. Now, researchers are taking a closer look at how these insects manage to overcome human interference.

"Mosquitoes adapt to heat, lifestyle, pesticides and so on-and we see traces of that in their genome," said Sergey Nuzhdin, one of the researchers, in a news release.

In this latest study, the scientists teamed up to sequence the genomes of various populations of mosquitoes. They looked at urban and suburban mosquitoes in their countries and also at two different but related species: Culex pipiens and Culex torrentium. Then, the researchers tracked which genes were evolving the fastest by noting which were preserved most accurately in each genome.

Genes are subject to copying errors over time. This causes a lot of variations throughout a population of a specific gene, then it probably isn't crucial to their survival.

"In addition to the insights into the contemporary evolution of mosquitoes, the methods we used in this study can be applied to compare genes under natural selection across populations of any species, including humans," said Hosseinali Asgharian, lead author of the study.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

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