One step into the mosquito-fungal frontier: Elucidating the mosquito mycobiome

Understanding the interactions between mosquitoes and their microbiota has been an important steppingstone on the pathway to comprehend mosquito-pathogen interactions. Correspondingly, we can use this knowledge to find novel mechanisms for mosquito control. Recent studies on entomopathogenic fungi offer great promise as potential tools to control insect pests of agricultural importance. However, in mosquitoes there are many mosquito-associated fungi of the natural microbiota that have not yet been characterized, which leads to the knowledge gap on which members are essential for mosquito biology. For this reason, we profiled the mycobiome – the mosquito-associated fungi – of three mosquito species, Aedes taeniorhynchus, Anopheles atropos, and Culex nigripalpus, collected in Vero Beach, Florida during the dry and wet seasons. Previous research shows diverse microbial communities associate with different mosquito tissues. Therefore, we isolated fungi from two mosquito tissues: (1) profiling fungi from the midgut using ITS 1-2-based Illumina Mi-Seq, and (2) sanger sequencing a series of individual fungi isolated from the cuticle. Interestingly, we observed a high diversity of fungi, and that different fungal phyla dominated the two tissues. One fungal class, Microbotryomycetes, accounted for more than half of the fungal load in all mosquito midguts. We also saw that this class dominated the Anopheles atropos midgut mycobiome, which was less diverse than the other two species. Our findings open multiple new pathways for future research into links between mosquitoes, fungi, and their implications on the mosquito-pathogen interaction, highlighting their role in mosquito biology.