Mosquito Akirin as a potential antigen for malaria control

Malaria Journal

Research

Renato Pinheiro-Silva¹  Mário da Costa¹  Sandra Antunes¹  Ana Custódio²  Henrique Silveira²  Ana Domingos²  Juan A Moreno-Cid³  Margarita Villar³  José de la Fuente⁴ 

[1] Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Rua da Junqueira 100, 1349-008, Lisbon, Portugal;Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Rua da Junqueira 100, 1349-008, Lisbon, Portugal;Centro de Malária e Outras Doenças Tropicais, Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, Rua da Junqueira 100, 1349-008, Lisbon, Portugal;SaBio. Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos IREC, CSIC-UCLM-JCCM, Ronda de Toledo s/n, 13005, Ciudad Recal, Spain;SaBio. Instituto de Investigación en Recursos Cinegéticos IREC, CSIC-UCLM-JCCM, Ronda de Toledo s/n, 13005, Ciudad Recal, Spain;Department of Veterinary Pathobiology, Center for Veterinary Health Sciences, Oklahoma State University, 74078, Stillwater, OK, USA;

关键词: Akirin;    Arthropod;    Mosquito;    Subolesin;    Vaccine;    Malaria;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1475-2875-13-470

 received in 2014-09-15, accepted in 2014-11-27,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe control of vector-borne diseases is important to improve human and animal health worldwide. Malaria is one of the world’s deadliest diseases and is caused by protozoan parasites of the genus Plasmodium, which are transmitted by Anopheles spp. mosquitoes. Recent evidences using Subolesin (SUB) and Akirin (AKR) vaccines showed a reduction in the survival and/or fertility of blood-sucking ectoparasite vectors and the infection with vector-borne pathogens. These experiments suggested the possibility of using AKR for malaria control.MethodsThe role of AKR on Plasmodium berghei infection and on the fitness and reproduction of the main malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae was characterized by evaluating the effect of akr gene knockdown or vaccination with recombinant mosquito AKR on parasite infection levels, fertility and mortality of female mosquitoes.ResultsGene knockdown by RNA interference in mosquitoes suggested a role for akr in mosquito survival and fertility. Vaccination with recombinant Aedes albopictus AKR reduced parasite infection in mosquitoes fed on immunized mice when compared to controls.ConclusionsThese results showed that recombinant AKR could be used to develop vaccines for malaria control. If effective, AKR-based vaccines could be used to immunize wildlife reservoir hosts and/or humans to reduce the risk of pathogen transmission. However, these vaccines need to be evaluated under field conditions to characterize their effect on vector populations and pathogen infection and transmission.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© da Costa et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.