Dec 28, 2014 04:50 AM EST By J Baulkman, UniversityHerald Reporter

An international research team is providing new insight into how mosquitoes transmit malaria.

In a recent study, researchers determined the genetic sequencing of 16 mosquitoes (Anopheles genus)--the sole carriers of human malaria.

Mathematician Cedric Chauve and his student, Ashok Rajaraman, from Simon Fraser University used computational methods to reconstruct ancestral mosquito genomes and analyze their chromosomal evolution over the past hundred million years.

Their hope is to understand how chromosomes evolved and to unravel potential adaptation mechanisms that may be related to malaria transmission. They also hope to determine the genetic differences between these species and others that are merely bothersome and not toxic.

They found that while only mosquitoes belonging to the Anopheles genus species transmit human malaria, not all species within the genus, or even all members of each vector species, are efficient malaria carriers.

 "This suggests an underlying genetic/genomic plasticity that results in a variation of key traits determining transmission capacity within the genus," Chauve said in a statement. "This is a very exciting project because there is no way we could sequence the genomes of long-dead ancestral mosquitoes species, without precious data from current species that was supplied by the biological team."

While advances in malaria control have met with successes, the sequencing of these 16 new genomes will contribute to further understanding the genomic adaptability of mosquitoes in transmitting malaria.

The findings are detailed in the journal Science.

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