Rockies and High Plains Vector-borne Diseases Center Summer Internship

      I am nearing the end of the insecticide resistance surveillance project that my partner Fernando and I have been working on. It has been really cool to see the process go full circle and to have moved through the entire process myself. I had six sites I collected from, where I was able to sort out a sufficient number of Culex Tarsalis to bioassay with sufficient replicate numbers. I caught the mosquitoes, sorted them, performed bottle assays, froze them, extracted their DNA, and then qPCR'd them. While I initially thought I might find heterozygote genotypes for a kdr mutation because a number of the mosquitoes were recovering after being knocked down, the qPCR results showed that 99% of the mosquitoes caught were homozygotes for the wild-type allele that is susceptible to the insecticide permethrin.      I spoke to my Karla (my PI) about this and she said that the behavior of the Culex Tarsalis, and their ability to recover, but the lack of kdr mutati...

       The past two weeks, I have been working to help finish up the PCRs for the kdr mutations in Aedes aegypti from a thermal project that is being done in the Saavedra Lab, and with this project's work being wrapped up, my focus has switched over to the RaHP surveillance project.  This has meant a lot more mosquito identification work, which is more difficult now that there is not primarily Aedes Vexans in our overnight CO2 traps. We are finally starting to get a good amount of Culex Tarsalis in our traps, which is the primary focus of our surveillance, although we are also conducting bottle bioassays on Culex Pipiens simply because of the number of individuals we have been able to trap.     We have had mixed results from traps and sometimes will have up to 90% of the individuals in the trap being Tarsalis, and other times only a few individuals in the trap being Tarsalis, which has made conducting consistent bioassay trials with sufficient replicat...

 My first month working in the Saavedra lab as a part of the RaHP Vec Program has been filled with a lot of learning moments. I have had to learn how the insectary operates, how to identify mosquito species and sexes, and I have had to apply my coursework learning to lab procedures that are mostly new to me. My undergraduate coursework has prepared me well for the projects I am working on, but learning to apply this knowledge to real-world situations has been a new experience. Applications of everything from simple skills like dimensional analysis to molecular genetics, evolutionary modeling, and physiology have made my first month in the RaHP program not only interesting and exciting but also a good refresher on a lot of topics. When I first started a month ago, I was unsure of how to operate in the lab and the insectary, spent a good number of evenings reviewing lesser-understood topics, and needed a lot of help with learning how to do things. Now, a month later, I can work effic...