Abstract

Malaria is a preventable treatable infectious disease but still it kills up to 600,000 people each year, primarily children under the age of five. The disease is caused by a single celled parasitic organism that is only transmitted between humans by Anopheles mosquitoes. If the mosquitoes that transmit the parasite were eliminated or prevented from transmitting, malaria would end. Gaining a deeper understanding of Anopheles malaria mosquitoes is an especially important undertaking in Africa, where the vast majority of malaria deaths occur and where there are many species contributing to the disease burden. Among these, four are considered major malaria vectors, probably accounting for more than 95% of transmission. This talk will present several different genomic approaches we are taking to thoroughly characterise Anopheles mosquitoes. These include amplicon panels to understand mosquito species diversity and distributions, short read sequencing to glean a comprehensive understanding of population structure and selection, and long read sequencing to peek into rapidly diverging regions of the genome that short reads cannot offer resolution for. This talk will discuss what we have learned to date and how this contributes to malaria control.

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