A new analysis outlines how the yellow fever–causing mosquito Aedes aegypti may have developed its taste for human blood around the birth of the Saharan desert.
began to hitch rides out of West African ports during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. It spread to the Americas and then to Asia, causing centuries of disease outbreaks to ripple through the colonial world. Today, its globally invasive descendants act as the main disease vector for the yellow fever, Zika, chikungunya, and dengue viruses, collectively causing hundreds of millions of infections each year.
But how, exactly, the yellow fever mosquito first evolved to bite people, priming it to stow away on ships and thrive in new destinations, is murkier. Researchers agree on the outlines of the story: A subpopulation ofsplit from a harmless ancestor that preferred to live in forests and feed on animals, not people. “The thing we didn’t know was when, how, or why all that happened,” says Noah Rose, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California , San Diego.
that concludes the fateful split occurred about 5000 years ago, during a period of natural climate change in the West African Sahel, at the southern border of the Sahara.using the genome,” says Athanase Badolo, an entomologist at Joseph Ki-Zerbo University in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, who helped collect mosquitoes and co-authored the study.
Rose’s team began by sampling different yellow fever mosquito populations from both forests and cities. In 2020,for human odors seemed clustered in arid, urban communities in the Sahel, suggesting the first human-focused mosquitoes likely evolved there, drawn to towns because they offered dense human populations and water during long dry seasons.
For their newer analysis, Rose’s team turned to a computational technique typically applied to reconstructing human migrations from divergent genomes scattered across the world. Once two biological populations are separated and can no longer interbreed, their genomes increasingly diverge over time. The accumulated mutations serve as a clock that, if calibrated with known dates, can be rewound to pinpoint the dates of divergences.
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