What's Your Vector Victor? Baiting Mosquitoes For Smarter Vector Surveillance

By CourtesyMarch 31, 2016

Smart-trap Surveillance Prototype
(Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

Fort Belvoir, Va. - Deployed warfighters have more challenges than just fighting adversaries. Environmental conditions, such as the weather, terrain and vector-borne diseases all pose additional threats. Collaborative efforts between the Defense Threat Reduction Agency's Joint Science and Technology Office and Sandia National Laboratories are focusing on new methodologies of vector surveillance to detect emerging infections in local mosquito populations and the development of a near real-time recording system to combat these threats.

This innovative research will provide warfighters with more information on mosquito-borne diseases in areas of deployment allowing for future vector control. Additionally, it could be utilized in the public sector to reduce manpower and turnaround time for general mosquito spraying operations in urban areas. Current approaches to vector surveillance are low-tech sample collectors that require work to be done manually and do not produce results for one to two weeks.

JSTO and Sandia National Laboratories are developing a smart-trap mosquito surveillance system that can be autonomous for one month and will wirelessly upload the results to the Biosurveillance Ecosystem (BSVE), a JSTO-developed, cloud-based software application that allows users to identify and quickly respond to public health concerns. The team is collaborating with the University of California to evaluate various liquid sugar baits that will lure mosquitoes to a small feeding station, called the "bait cave." While feeding in the bait cave, the mosquitoes will deposit their saliva, which will contain any viruses they may be carrying.

To test for multiple viruses at once, the system runs loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP). LAMP is an amplification process similar to polymerase chain reaction, but differs in that it performs the reaction at a constant temperature instead of cycling through various ones. This allows for lower power requirements for the instrument and makes it more versatile for field operations. The box will remain dormant for the majority of the day, only turning on via battery, once a day to perform the analysis and upload results to the BSVE.

The current effort is developing the multiplex evaluation for West Nile, St. Louis Encephalitis and Western Equine Encephalitis viruses as they are all found in the vector Culex tarsalis and attracted to sugar baits.

Box development should be completed by the summer 2016 with field-testing beginning mid to late summer near the Salton Sea in Southern California. This smarter vector surveillance device will allow decision makers to understand the active diseases within a region and appropriately vaccinate and equip warfighters before deployment.