Jeffrey R Powell
Yale University, CT·Ecology & Evolution
Where did the world's most dangerous disease-carrying mosquito come from, and what made it so good at spreading human viruses? Aedes aegypti carries the viruses behind yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and Zika.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Genetics
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
Aedes aegypti
mosquito
disease vector
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2026
What they work on
- Map genetic diversity and evolutionary relationships among Southwest Indian Ocean populations of Aedes aegypti and its relatives Ae. mascarensis and Ae. pia, using population genetics and phylogeography to identify candidate cryptic species.
- Test whether the ancestral island populations of Ae. aegypti have vector competence, the ability to become infected with and transmit the viruses that cause human diseases such as dengue and Zika.
- Characterize the virome of field-caught females to find out whether they carry known human arboviruses (insect-borne viruses) or new, undescribed viruses.
- Identify the hosts these mosquitoes feed on through blood meal analysis, and find out where they breed in the wild.
- Assemble complete genomes for the most informative populations and species, enabling comparative genomics and inference of the ancestral Ae. aegypti genome as a reference resource.
More about the research
The team has recently shown that the ancestors of every Ae. aegypti population, in Africa and worldwide, still live on islands in the Southwest Indian Ocean (SWIO), including Madagascar. These islands gave rise to the continental African form, Ae. aegypti formosus, no earlier than about 100,000 years ago. Studying these ancestral populations offers a window into how a mosquito species became a major threat to human health.
Why it matters
Ae. aegypti spreads yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and Zika to people around the world. Learning whether its island ancestors can transmit these viruses, which hosts they feed on, and whether they carry unknown viruses that might infect humans could reveal how the species became such an effective disease carrier. An inferred ancestral genome would give researchers studying this mosquito a shared baseline for comparison.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Laura B Dickson
University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston, TX·Microbiology & Immunology
Test whether formation of the peritrophic matrix, a sac around the blood meal, changes Aedes aegypti midgut susceptibility to arboviruses by controlling how easily the virus reaches the gut lining.
Lisa Baik
University of California-Davis, CA·Neuroscience·Early-career
Test how taste neurons of Aedes albopictus respond to a panel of taste compounds, including blends of human host cues with different compositions, using physiological recordings.
Alun Lloyd
North Carolina State University, NC·Mathematics & Statistics
Measure how residents of Ibagué, Colombia differ in adopting mosquito-prevention behaviors around the home, such as water container management, and identify the cues that drive them, using observational and experimental social science methods.
The school
Yale University: 73 labs on PI Pages, $1.5B a year on research, 438 research doctorates a year.
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