Blood, sweat, and beers: investigating mosquito biting preferences amidst noise and intoxication in a cross-sectional cohort study at a large music festival https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.08.21.671470v1
🦟🦠 Check out our latest article in @natcomms.nature.com on the genetic basis of #dengue virus susceptibility in #mosquitoes! Collaborative work brillantly led by @merklinglab.bsky.social and @elodiecouderc.bsky.social @pasteur.fr and primarily supported by @agencerecherche.bsky.social rdcu.be/eBbg7
🎉 Our study is now published in Cell Genomics ! Thank to our reviewers for helping us further improve our work, and congratulations to @tompvial.bsky.social who lead this project and the entire team that made it possible ! www.cell.com/cell-genomic...
Thrilled to receive @anrs-mie.bsky.social grant with @lambrechtslab.bsky.social & @retrogenomics.bsky.social! Making mosquitoes intolerant to arboviruses. Thanks @pasteur.fr, @inserm.fr & @cnrs.fr for support. Exciting times for #ARBORETRO project! Stay tunned.
Photos of Aedes aegypti female (left) and male (right). Numbers indicate location of collected tissues (listed in legend boxes). Photos by Alex Wild.
I am thrilled to present the Mosquito Cell Atlas! We analyzed 367K nuclei from 19 tissues in male & female mosquitoes, creating a comprehensive resource for vector biology & infectious disease research.
Plus we made some surprising discoveries! 🦟🧵
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Happy to share our work exploring the genetic basis of dengue susceptibility in Aedes aegypti and revealing the antiviral role of a cytochrome P450. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
It had been a long and wild ride that started back when I was a postdoc within @lambrechtslab.bsky.social ! A thread ⬇️
This may be the darkest of times, but I won’t let it stop me from celebrating this little moment: I received the keys to my new lab @ucdavis.bsky.social today ☺️
#ScienceMustGoOn 🧬🧪🦟
Very grateful to have been awarded a #MSCA post-doc fellowship! With Felix Hol and Teun Bousema, we will bring BuzzWatch to the field to study mosquito behavior in malaria-endemic regions.
Starting in #RadboudUmc, our first goal is to make BuzzWatch portable enough to be transported by bicycle 🦟🚲🇳🇱.
Three panel figure, with preference index on the y-axis, and wavelength in (nm) on the x-axis. Below the x-axis are circle diagrams showing the control stimuli (all grey circles) and the test stimuli (colors ranging from purple to a dark red). The top panel is labeled with a cloud of CO2 and a diagram of a flower. The middle panel is labeled with a cloud of CO2 and a diagram of a foot. The bottom panel is labeled with a cloud of CO2 and a jar of green liquid (oviposition lure). All three panels have a dotted line representing preference with CO2 alone. This line dips down in the green. In each figure there is an additional line representing the odor overlayed, with the area in between the two lines colored according to wavelength. There are also arrows labeling areas where there are significant shift in preference. In all cases there is a significant positive shift in preference in the green wavelengths.
Excited that my first manuscript from my time at the @riffelllab.bsky.social is out as a preprint! Building on past work, we used wind tunnel bioassays to show that the odors of human hosts, flowers, and oviposition sites shift the visual preferences of mosquitos.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Thanks again to Felix Hol and @lambrechtslab.bsky.social
Also credits to Zhong Wan, Phd student with Felix Hol at RadboudUMC who carried all the experiments and analysis with Anopheles and was played a key role in developing the method, especially the Dutch version!
More news on that soon!
🥵 This was a lot of examples, yet only scratched the surface of what BuzzWatch can teach us about mosquito behavior. Have a burning question that BuzzWatch could help answer? Start here:
theomaire.github.io/buzzwatch/
and don't hesitate to contact me or Felix!
We tested mosquito responses to multiple daily stimulations over 9 days
Ae. aegypti showed a 2-fold higher response during the day than at night (expected from a day biting mosquito:) ), although spontaneous flight activity without host cues was nearly the same and close to zero at those times !
The movie shows mosquitoes quickly flying to the heated bottom window and attempting to insert their proboscis, demonstrating their heat-seeking response (and that they are not that smart because a heating peltier elt. will provide a good blood-meal..)
As a final application example, we added a simple "host-seeking" module to measure mosquito responses to short pulses of CO₂ and heat at specific times of the day.
As environmental perturbation, we tested the impact of increasing the photoperiod from 12 to 20 hours of light per day.
Mosquitoes quickly adapted with a new complex rhythm but also showed subtle shifts over time.
This is most striking in the PCA graph, where each dot represents a single day!
In these experiments, mosquitoes had no egg-laying site. We thus tested if egg-laying could reverse blood-feeding induced changes.
➡️ Answer: Yes, but only partially.
Overall, the effects of blood-feeding and egg-laying are small, yet consistent and measurable.
We examined the effect of blood feeding 🩸 by monitoring mosquitoes before and after a blood meal.
➡️Following a 2-day period of full rest, we observed subtle changes in their daily rhythm.
➡️Interestingly, these changes were long-lasting and showed no sign of gradual decline.
Fun side quest : in the global pattern method, datasets from various species can be easily compared, here we show for :
➡️Ae. aegypti (Aaa and Aaf)
➡️Ae. albopictus
➡️An. stephensi, gambiae, and coluzzi
PC1 represents day vs. night activity, while PC2 indicates total activity.
To assess this observation, we developed 2 statistical tools
➡️A "local" tool resembling a "barcode" for easy comparison of different features (e.g. sugar feeding)
➡️A "global" tool using dimensional reduction on daily profiles
Both confirmed that "Aaa" is distinct due to increased midday activity!
First, we used the great panel of Ae. aegypti colonies (tested 10!) from @lambrechtslab.bsky.social and found a clear pattern :
➡️the globally invasive subspecies "Aaa" is more active (fly more) during midday compared to the African "Aaf," but not during the morning or evening peaks.
To demonstrate its potentiel, with BuzzWatch multi-scale analysis, we already explored:
➡️Variations in the daily rhythms of Aedes aegypti subspecies. 🌍🌎
➡️Phenotypic plasticity after blood feeding 🩸 or changes in photoperiod. 🔆
➡️Responses to host-cue pulses 🌬️ during day vs. night. 🌓
The BuzzWatch GUI app allows you to quickly reproduce analyses with just a few clicks. It's actually more than a gadget—its speed is great for exploring datasets and conducting "night science" fishing expeditions without predefined hypotheses.
Once all videos are analyzed, we can combine the data to perform multi-scale analysis. This includes examining flight trajectories in seconds, daily rhythms over hours, and long-term trends over days and weeks.
We created a Python GUI app for mosquito video analysis, tracking flying and resting behaviors. By using abundant footage, we easily generate a clear background devoid of mosquitoes and utilize basic blob detection and tracking—no deep learning and manual labelling needed.
To control the environment, you can use options like building a custom box with LED strips or placing everything inside a climatic chamber. Just unleash your inner mosquito house architect! 🦟🏠 (and use constant infrared illumination!)
How to make it happen?
➡️Use laser cut acrylic, Raspberry Pi computer, cheap cameras, glue and white paper!
Instructions and templates are gathered here :
theomaire.github.io/buzzwatch/co...
otherwise feel free to contact me or Felix directly!
What BuzzWatch does:
1. Automatically film mosquitoes in a transparent cage continuously, at 25 FPS, for several weeks (low resolution, about 10GB/day)
2.Analyze each 20-minute segment independently to track flying and resting mosquitoes
3.Extract flight and sugar feeding activity over weeks
Thrilled to share 'BuzzWatch', my post-doc work with Felix Hol and @lambrechtslab.bsky.social
➡️Filming mosquitoes in a cage with a €15 camera but for 700h(1month) revealed fascinating insights into their behavior⌛🦟🎥⏳
preprint🔍 doi.org/10.1101/2025...
DIY guide 🛠️ theomaire.github.io/buzzwatch
🧵⬇️
🦟 Pestered by mosquitoes? Fear not—grapefruit might hold the key! 🍊In our latest paper in @currentbiology.bsky.social, led by Merybeth Triana and Felipe Andreazza, we explore how nootkatone, a compound derived from grapefruit, affects mosquitoes. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...
