Yuck, my brood of dipteran eggs is filthy. If I don’t do something fast, my unborn larvae may never live to see their third instar.
Fortunately Emma’s here to save the day! She gives a how-to on cleaning mosquito eggs in order to improve their life expectancy in the insectary.
This was actually a deleted scene from the Insectary video, a previous post on our blog.
In order to better understand malaria and its spread, we first need to have an understanding of how the carriers of this disease behave. One of the big questions that we are exploring is, what attracts mosquitoes to humans in the first place? Sure they need our blood to reproduce, but how are they able to seek us out? How do they know to land on me and not the tree I’m standing next to? Why are some mosquitoes within a species more attracted to cows, and others more attracted to humans?
We’ve been seeing more and more visitors from the media around here. The most recent journalist to peruse the lab was Newsweek’s Dan Lyons, who was looking for the lowdown on our malaria work. Although the Photonic Fence, a.k.a. the mosquito laser system, has gotten most of the press lately due to Nathan Myhrvold’s TED talk, we have several other malaria projects that are starting to turn heads as well.
The meat of the article follows Karima Nigmatulina, 
Ph.D. and Philip Eckhoff, Ph.D. (pictured above) and their disease modeling software. A few other projects got shout-outs as well. These include malaria detection tools headed by Michael Hegg, Ph.D. and Ben Wilson Ph.D. (pictured below), the artificial mosquito diet of Barcin Acar Ph.D. and Emma Mullen, and of course 3ric Johanson’s Photonic Fence. Even TerraPower managed to sneak in there.
Dan was a machine, bolting from group to group and scrawling endless notes in the process; we watched him fill up three whole pads of paper! The result is “Short-Circuiting Malaria,” which can be found on Newsweek‘s website and will be in print any day now. We appreciate the coverage and are excited that more of our projects are being recognized.
Check out the Newsweek article here.
If you have followed us for long, you’ve probably heard of our facility’s supercomputer and laser systems. However, the first thing I like to reveal when telling people about the lab is the mosquito insectary. Not only is it slightly bizarre having colonies of pests nurtured and bred mere feet away from where I work everyday, but the insectary serves a vital role in several of the lab’s projects.
The insectary consists of the supplies and equipment needed to grow mosquitos, and is housed in rooms that mimic the temperature and humidity of India and Sub-Saharan Africa, where these species originate. Biologists Barcin Acar and Emma Mullen conduct experiments and observations at all stages of the insects’ life cycle in order to gain a better understanding of their behavior, anatomy and vulnerabilities so that we can have every advantage possible in the fight against malaria. Barcin and Emma work closely with Photonic Fence and other projects, providing invaluable support to disease eradication efforts.
You can image that preparing a TED talk is no small task. However, a demonstration as ambitious and technical as shooting mosquitoes with lasers proved to be quite a feat.
Between enhancing and cleaning up the software, assembling and mounting all the components, and just making sure everything looked nice and polished, we had a half dozen people occupied for over a month. During the last minute scrabble, some valuable lessons were learned. First, when the shipping company delivers the wrong crate to TED, effectively losing the world’s only Photonic Fence, it helps not to panic. Also, we now know that hotel water glasses are great places to grow extra mosquitoes when you’re running low.
Getting ready for TED was a lot of work, but nevertheless fun and surreal. We are excited about the enthusiastic response following Nathan’s talk, and can’t wait to share our next big idea with you.
