Cell Atlas of Mosquito Immunology Reveals New Avenues for Eradicating Malaria

Malaria is one of the biggest ongoing threats to global health — over 200 million were infected and almost half a million lost their lives as a result of this mosquito-born parasitic disease in 2018 alone. Besides controlling the populations of these blood-sucking vectors, scientists are now turning to state-of-the-art genomic approaches to stop malarial transmission in a whole new way: from inside the mosquito.

The first breakthrough in this strategy came in the form of the first-ever atlas of all mosquito immune cells, recently published in the journal Science. This effort, led by an international team of researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Umeå University in Sweden revealed rare immune cells and molecular pathways in mosquitoes that could hold the key to finally eradicating this devastating disease.

The creation of this immune map involved the analysis of over 8,500 mosquito immune cells, revealing an unprecedented glimpse into the complexity of the mosquito immune response following infection with the malaria-causing Plasmodium parasite.

“We have carried out the first-ever large scale survey of the mosquito immune system, and using single-cell sequencing technology we found immune cell types and cell…