A Tiny but Mighty Helper Stops Mosquito Viruses in Their Tracks
A Tiny but Mighty Helper Stops Mosquito Viruses in Their Tracks
Mariella Bodemeier Loayza Careaga, The Scientist, 2024.Luciano Moreira, a vector biologist and the project lead of the World Mosquito Program in Brazil, has always been driven by solving people’s problems. As a kid, he concocted blends of house-cleaning products to eliminate common home pests; in adulthood, Moreira channeled his problem-solving tendencies into finding innovative ways to tackle mosquito-borne pathogens for more than two decades. Now he tests these strategies to ease the burden of diseases that affect millions of people in his home country and around the world.
Moreira worked on approaches to fight agricultural pests during his graduate studies at the Federal University of Viçosa. He focused on tomato leafminers, insects whose larvae feed on leaves and create white, winding trails called mines on their surfaces. Injured leaves tend to drop prematurely, and infested plants may lose most of their leaves, affecting fruit size and yield. By investigating plants that were resilient against leafminers, Moreira and his colleagues identified markers of resistance located on chromosome two of tomato plants.
After concluding his graduate studies, he pursued a postdoctoral position at the laboratory of molecular entomologist Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, now an emeritus researcher at John Hopkins University. Jacobs-Lorena and his team were interested in using transgenic mosquitoes to control the transmission of the single-celled parasite Plasmodium, the causative agent of malaria. “We did lots of molecular biology, trying to find genes and promoters of the genes that would block Plasmodium inside the mosquitoes,” Moreira said.
