Arthropod-borne viruses (arboviruses) pose a considerable threat to human and animal health, yet effective control measures have proven difficult to implement, and novel means of controlling their replication in arthropod vectors, such as mosquitoes, are urgently required. One of the most exciting approaches to emerge from research on arthropods is the use of the endosymbiotic intracellular bac...

Vineyards were surveyed for grapevine leafroll-associated viruses and their insect vectors in New York State's Finger Lakes region in 2006-2008. Grape mealybug, Pseudococcus maritimus (Erhorn) (Hemiptera: Pseudococcidae), European Fruit Lecanium, Parthenolecanium corni (Bouche), and Cottony Maple Scale, Pulvinaria acericola (Walsh and Riley) (Hemiptera: Coccidae) were identified as vector speci...

Wolbachia are maternally inherited bacterial endosymbionts that naturally infect a diverse array of arthropods. They are primarily known for their manipulation of host reproductive biology, and recently, infections with Wolbachia have been proposed as a new strategy for controlling insect vectors and subsequent human-transmissible diseases. Yet, Wolbachia abundance has been shown to vary greatl...

Malaria and other vector-borne diseases contribute to the major disease burden in India. One of the methods to control these diseases is to control the vectors for the interruption of disease transmission. In the past, synthetic organic chemical insecticidesbased intervention measures for the control of insect pests and disease vectors have resulted in development of insecticide resistance in s...

Mosquito-borne diseases are causing a substantial burden of mortality, morbidity and economic loss in many parts of the world, despite current control efforts, and new complementary approaches to controlling these diseases are needed. One promising class of new interventions under development involves the heritable modification of the mosquito by insertion of novel genes into the nucleus or of ...

Wolbachia pipientis is an intracellular symbiont of arthropods well known for the reproductive manipulations induced in the host and, more recently, for the ability of Wolbachia to block virus replication in insect vectors. Since Wolbachia cannot yet be genetically manipulated, and due to the constraints imposed when working with an intracellular symbiont, little is known about mechanisms used ...

The holobiont concept was first developed for coral ecosystems but has been extended to multiple organisms, including plants and other animals. Studies on insect-associated microbial communities have produced strong evidence that symbiotic bacteria play a major role in host biology. However, the understanding of these symbiotic relationships has mainly been limited to phytophagous insects, whil...

The use of Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) endotoxins to control insect vectors of human diseases and agricultural pests is threatened by the possible evolution of resistance in major pest species. In addition to high levels of resistance produced by receptor insensitivity (5, 16, 17), several cases of tolerance to low to medium levels of toxin have been reported in laboratory colonies of lepidopte...

This report describes novel baculovirus vectors designed to express mammalian beta1,4-galactosyltransferase and alpha2,6-sialyltransferase genes at early times after infection. Sf9 cells infected with these viral vectors, unlike cells infected with a wild-type baculovirus, produced a sialylated viral glycoprotein during the late phase of infection. Thus, the two mammalian glycosyltransferases e...

Recently we cloned and sequenced the first eight Trypanosoma cruzi polymorphic microsatellite loci and studied 31 clones and strains to obtain valuable information about the population structure of the parasite. We have now studied 23 further strains, increasing from 11 to 31 the number of strains obtained from patients with chronic Chagas disease. This expanded set of 54 strains and clones ana...