Mosquito excrement could provide valuable insight on potential pathogens. Scientists have created a “toilet” to collect the insect waste, which can then be analyzed. The results showed a variety of viruses, including some never seen before.
Valuable waste
Mosquito excreta (or waste matter) has “recently emerged as a promising alternative substrate for pathogen detection,” said a study published in the journal Microbiology Spectrum. This detection in mosquito populations “can provide a critical warning before human cases begin, allowing health officials to act quickly.”
Analyzing mosquito waste showed the presence of viruses along with other parasites. To collect the mosquito excretions, scientists built a “mosquito toilet,” which is a “3D-printed funnel coated with a superhydrophobic (water-repelling) material that causes liquid to bead up and slide into a collection tube,” said a release about the study.
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Researchers then sequenced the genetic material and “recovered a complete West Nile virus genome, found the first known evidence of a Hedwig-like virus in the Americas and detected several viruses that may be new to science,” said the release. (The Hedwig virus was first “identified in Europe in snowy owl tissue, prompting scientists to name it after Harry Potter’s famous white owl.”) Some of the infected birds also had West Nile virus. Scientists “don’t know whether Hedwig-like viruses make birds sick, facilitate West Nile infections or simply coexist with other viruses.”
Along with West Nile and the Hedwig-like virus, the mosquito waste also contained trypanosomatids, which are “single-celled parasites associated with insects and other hosts,” said Earth.com. One parasite “produced tens of thousands of genetic matches in the samples.”
Traditional mosquito surveillance “requires collecting large numbers of insects, sorting them by species, grinding them into pools and testing for specific pathogens,” said Lab Compare. This slow process can “delay information during an outbreak and only detects what researchers already know to look for.” If “you don’t look for it, you won’t find it,” Dana Price, an entomologist and associate professor at Rutgers University who led the research, said in the release. “But what if you don’t know what to look for?”
Time and place
While the presence of the viruses and microbes is alarming, experts say there is no need to panic. “A virus found for the first time in a region may have recently arrived or may have gone unnoticed for years,” said the release. Only a “few broad mosquito-virus studies have been conducted in North America,” so “organisms that seem geographically restricted may prove widespread.”
The “more data we generate, the more we start to wonder if everything is everywhere,” Price said in the release. “Although we don’t yet know how much of everything is everywhere, it may be a lot more than we realize.” Also, just because a pathogen is found in mosquitoes does not mean it will pass to humans.
This study only involved 100 mosquitoes collected from one location in New Jersey, so the “results cannot show how common these viruses are across New Jersey or elsewhere in North America,” said Earth.com. The mosquitoes were also “moved into the collection device in a laboratory” rather than tested at the collection point.
Researchers are now “working toward a field-ready trap that would collect mosquitoes and their waste,” said the release. Eventually there may be a “system that could prepare samples, sequence genetic material, analyze the results remotely and alert scientists to a possible threat in real time.”
