In collaboration with an international group of researchers, Dr. John Soghigian has been awarded an NIH R01 to study Aedes aegypti and related mosquitoes in the southwestern Indian Ocean. The five-year award will fund the international team to assess evolutionary relationships and vector competency of important Aedes mosquitoes throughout the region.
This project continues the research of Soghigian and colleagues, published in 2020, that proposed the ancestral range of Aedes aegypti was the islands surrounding Madagascar. To better understand the cryptic diversity and ancestral populations of the yellow fever mosquito described in Soghigian et al., Dr. Soghigian and colleagues will identify new species using species delimitation methods, perform higher level systematics to understand the divergence times and relatedness of members of the Aegypti Group, and place those divergences of the group in context with know geologic events to gain a better understanding of how Ae. aegypti went from island hopper to globe trotter.
In addition, this project will fun a postdoc in the new Soghigian Lab, details of which will be posted soon.