One of the most dangerous malaria-carrying mosquitoes is rapidly evolving in response to control efforts, genetics has revealed.

Findings could inform smarter tools to monitor for and fight malaria. 🦟

Read more here ⤵️
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Our paper Genomic diversity of the African malaria vector Anopheles funestus was published in Science today! It features inversions, selection in action, museum specimens and putative new ecotypes. doi.org/10.1126/scie...

This work is the result of a fantastic collaboration between Ayala & team, Dadzie & team, Richard Durbin, Koekemoer & team, @marakat.bsky.social & team, @flygirlnhm.bsky.social , Ochomo & team, Okumu & team, Paaijmans & team, Tchouassi & team, Wondji & team and @gsugenomics.bsky.social . 8/8

We find that the doublesex gene drive target site is highly conserved within our dataset, which bodes well for using the same population suppression gene drive approach in An. funestus as is underway for An. gambiae. 7/8

In mosquitoes from the 1960s we find the rdl A296S mutation, which confers resistance to dieldrin. However, we do not observe any of the known DDT resistance alleles among the historic mosquitoes, even though phenotypic resistance has been reported since the late 1950s. 6/8

An H12 selection scan shows that strong recent signals of selection centred on canonical insecticide resistance genes are shared by multiple populations. 5/8

Mosquitoes from North Ghana have reduced genetic diversity consistent with a recent bottleneck. The population from South Benin has remarkable inversion frequencies and might be representative of a locally adapted ecotype. 4/8

We used a sliding window PCA to visualise structure along the genome. Here you see the 3Rb inversion with three distinct trajectories corresponding to the inversion karyotypes. The lines switching between trajectories are indicative of double recombination events. 3/8

We sequenced 656 modern specimens (collected 2014-2018) and 45 historic specimens (collected 1927-1967) from 16 African countries. Populations from around the equator have higher genetic diversity and are more connected than populations from south of the equator. 2/8

Preprint is out! We investigated the genomic diversity and evolutionary history of Anopheles funestus mosquitoes, one of the main species transmitting human malaria across Africa. Here’s a visual summary. Art by @petrathepostdoc.bsky.social . 1/8 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...