Category: News

Funded Research Exchanges

Posted on by Leah Johnson

We are pleased to announce funding for research exchanges for those working on behavioral and ecological aspects of vector borne diseases. The aim of these awards is to allow VectorBiTE network members the opportunity to spend time working intensively away from their home institutions, within a group with complementary expertise, to pursue VBiTE related research. 

In the spirit of the RCN, example exchanges could include learning about a different vector system, exchange between a theoretically and empirically based group, or a gathering of researchers to identify data standards or consolidate data for use. Exchanges must be completed before December 15, 2022. 

To apply please send your CV, Letter of support from host, a <2000 word description of the research, requirement for exchange (why can’t you do this virtually?), timeline and specific activities associated with the exchange, and a budget. 

The total budget should be no more than $5,000 USD and can cover economy travel, lodging, and subsistence. Due to the nature of the funding we can only support travel for US-based persons (of any nationality), usually to travel within the United States, although in some cases we may be able to fund limited international travel. 

Please send application materials to vectorbitercn@gmail.com. Applications for funding are rolling and will be reviewed as they come in. The last review will take place in November 2022, if funds are still available. Note that the total number of awards will be based on funding availability and demand, so we recommend applying early.

Board Meeting and Updated Operating Principles and Procedures

Posted on by Leah Johnson

The VectorBiTE Network Steering Committee and Advisory Board had it’s first meeting from 3-4 August 2022. During the meeting we began formulating long term plans for the Network and updated our OPP document. We are posting the OPP and soliciting feedback before the next meeting of the Steering Committee, scheduled for mid-September. If you have comments or feedback on the OPP document, please submit those through the VectorBiTE gmail account OR e-mail one of the steering committee members (see below).

Operating-Principles-And-Procedures-for-the-VectorBiTE-Network

Current Steering Committee

  • Leah Johnson (Chair)
  • Lauren Cator (Chair Elect)
  • Nicole Gottdenker
  • Peter Hudson
  • Cynthia Lord
  • Samraat Pawar
  • Catherine Lippi (trainee representative)

Current Advisory Board

  • Mike Boots
  • Shannon LaDeau
  • Sunny Power
  • Sadie Ryan
  • Sam Rund
  • Matt Thomas

New VectorBiTE Operating Principals and Procedures

Posted on by Zach Gajewski

The current VBiTE board and steering committee have developed and adopted new operating principles and procedures (OPP) for the network. This document will be used to guide the transition of the RCN into the future VBiTE network. Please take a moment and read the OPP document, attached below. Once you read over the document and still want to receive email updates from VBiTE and participate in the community please fill out the following survey. Please note that only those that fill out the survey and agree to adhere to the OPP will continue to get emails from VBiTE.

Operating-Principles-And-Procedures-for-the-VectorBiTE-Research-Coordination-Network

VectorBiTE 2021

Posted on by Miles Nesbit

Hello VectorBiTE members,

We are planning to hold virtual events this summer. These will include a symposium focusing on VectorBiTE related research topics and a training workshop. We are holding the symposium on July 8-9th and training on July 28-30th. Please apply on google forms for the symposium and for the training.

Similar to previous years we will be providing training in:

  1. Introduction VectorByte databases
  2. Data Wrangling
  3. Model Fitting Introduction
  4. Time Series
  5. Likelihoods
  6. Bayesian on Traits 
  7. Bayesian on Time Series

We hope you are all well and we look forward to seeing you again!

Best,

VectorBiTE Team

VectorBiTE 2019: Meeting Recap

Posted on by Zach Gajewski
  • Fondazione Edmund Mach in Trento, Italy

VectorBiTE 2019 just finished at Fondazione Edmund Mach in Trento, Italy! Just like last year, the meeting was split into two parts; training and then a general working group meeting. The first three days were the training session where graduate students and postdocs came to advance their data management and statistical skill set. The last two and half days were set aside for working groups to meet and continue making progress on their research projects.

The training session started off with general linear and non-linear models and moved on to time series and eventually fitting Bayesian models. The trainees worked extremely hard during the first two days to learn a bunch of new skills and then on the third day they applied what they had learned to a group project on either their own data sets and data from Vectorbyte’s VecDyn or VecTraits database. The training material can be found here.

  • Tuesday night, the training participants and the board members were treated to an amazing dinner on one of the mountain near Fondazione Edmund Mach.

On Thursday morning, all the VectorBiTE 2019 participants met up and the training participants shared what they had been working on. The working group leaders then gave a brief overview of what each working group has been doing and what they hope to accomplish at the meeting. Trainees were able to join working groups and apply their new skill sets to help the working groups. Check out the working group one page summaries to find out about what each group accomplished in this year’s meeting!

  • Presentation from E-STAR

During the working group portion of the meeting, we also got a video presentation from E-STAR, on mosquito prevention in Italy. The group showed us one of their videos that they use in their elementary school outreach events. The video focused on Ms. Mosquito and an elementary school child learning about how to prevent Ms. Mosquito from permanently moving to Trento, Italy. The video shared mosquito prevention methods that students can use and teach their parents.

This year’s meeting was at a stunning location filled with great scientific discussions. We are looking forward to seeing the outcomes of each working group from this year’s meeting!

  • Group photo from VectorBiTE 2019! Thanks Marta for taking the photo.

New skills learned at VectorBite’s training workshop

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

Blog post by Rebecca Brown

This year’s VectorBiTE meeting was held at the Asilomar conference centre by the stunning bays of Monterey, California. In the days ahead of the working group sessions, post-doc and graduate students attended a three-day training workshop on quantitative tools for vector-borne diseases. Led by the charismatic Leah Johnson (Virginia Tech) and Samraat Pawar (Imperial College London), the workshop took the format of lectures followed by guided examples of analysis to gain practical experience, with assistance from instructors Fadoua El Moustaid (Virginia Tech), Marta Shocket (Stanford University) and Matt Watts (Imperial College London).

The training started off with data wrangling and an introduction to the R packages dyplr and tidyr, showing off their aesthetically pleasing summaries! The importance of minimizing editing your raw data file was highlighted (something I am guilty of) thus a key outcome was to record all steps used to process your data with an R script. We learned that models are not only useful to explain relationships in observed data, but models are key for revealing underlying mechanisms driving observed patterns. In the context of vector-borne diseases this is critical for predicting disease outbreaks or assessing the efficacy or suitability of interventions. Model fitting by least squares methods was taught and we worked through an example of fitting a non-linear least squared model to insect trait data. This was followed by teaching on the likelihood based methods: Maximum likelihood estimation and Bayesian analysis, which was new territory for me. We were taken through the steps to fit a model using maximum likelihood by creating a function to return the negative log likelihood to build the likelihood profile based on the data.

Participants of the 2018 VectorBiTE training workshop pose in front of the conference center.

On the final day, our new-learned skills were put to the test with a challenge! Our group tackled understanding mosquito development rate variation with temperature by maximum likelihood estimation. All groups came together at the end to share how they addressed their problem. The previous two days of intensive training paid off because there was a notable improvement in my understanding and ease of using the new techniques. I’m looking forward to applying these tools in my own analysis now. Thank-you VectorBiTE!

———-

Rebecca Brown is a PhD student at the Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine in Glasgow. She is interested in the impact of land-use change on the transmission of vector-borne diseases. Her current research is on the behaviour and ecology of Anopheles vectors of Plasmodium knowlesi malaria in Malaysian Borneo.

VectorBITE 2018: Meeting Recap

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

The VectorBite 2018 meeting just wrapped up a productive week of training and working group meetings at the Asilomar Conference Center near Monterey, CA. This year’s meeting was split into two parts: a three-day training session for post-docs and graduate students followed by two days of working group meetings.

The training covered an introduction to data management, visualization, and fitting models to data and then focused on specific topics in using data on vectors to fit trait data to mechanistic and statistical models and to fit population dynamics models to data taken from Vectorbyte‘s VecDyn database. The training materials are posted on GitHub.

The working group meetings started off with brief presentations from working group leaders to discuss plans and give an overview of the working group’s interests. Thursday and Friday were then spent hashing out ideas and in some cases, outlining papers to write or experiments to do with group members.

Working group topics included modeling how life history trade-offs in vector traits may impact transmission of vector-borne disease, creating a framework to understand how behavioral manipulation of vectors may similarly impact transmission, characterizing when and where rate summation breaks down for predicting thermal performance curves for different vector traits, discussion of tick questing behavior, whether we can use body size or other traits to create integral projection models for vector populations, and individual-based models for vector populations.

Two days go by fast, especially when we only get to meet once per year! The discussions were stimulating, groups outlined concrete goals and plans for how to complete tasks between now and next year, and we still made time for some walks or runs along the beach and drinks at the Asilomar pub. Here’s to another great #Vbite meeting!

 

New methods to detect infected mosquitoes

Posted on by Johanna Ohm

Blog post by Jo Ohm

The past year has seen a number of clever new methods to detect infection in mosquito vectors. These new methods which allow for improved detection and monitoring of the time course of infections inside mosquitoes will be powerful tools for exploring many questions central to the research of VectorBiters.  If inventions fuel science and science fuels invention, the future of vector-borne disease research has exciting findings to come from the use of these new tools. Below are some of the latest methods published in the literature which promise to improve our understanding of vector-borne disease transmission:

  1. Detection of virus in mosquitoes using Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS) – NIRS has already been demonstrated to be useful in ageing mosquitoes and identifying between Anopheles species and a recent paper in Science Advances suggests it can be used to detect Zika-infected mosquitoes. Pluses: 18x faster and 110x cheaper than using RT-qPCR for Zika detection ; Minuses: destructive sampling, requires highly sensitive microspectrometer, unknown if it will work with field samples
  2. Malaria sporozoites measured through sugar feeding – A Nature Scientific Reports paper published earlier this month reports a nondestructive way to detect when malaria-infected mosquitoes become infectious by using PCR to detect parasites left behind in sugar-soaked cotton or FTA cards. This method is similar to methods already developed to detect dengue from mosquito sugar water. Pluses: Nondestructive sample, possible to use on individual mosquitoes (?) ; Minuses: Feeding on sugar through FTA cards reduces survival compared to feeding on sugar through cotton
  3. Identifying Aedes species and Wolbachia-infection status with a cellphone – Recently on bioRxiv, Bhadra et al report detection of Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes using an assay that fluoresces in response to the presence of Wolbachia-specific nucleic acids, which should be useful for surveillance purposes following Wolbachia-based mosquito field releases. Pluses: No DNA extractions required, likely to work in field settings ; Minuses: ?
  4. Track mosquitoes using rhodamine b – Mosquito mark-recapture experiments are notoriously difficult and marking with fluorescent dies can have fitness costs on the mosquitoes being marked. A new way to mark mosquitoes using rhodamine b fed through a honey solution was reported to have no detectable fitness costs on marked males. This should be a useful tool for capturing dispersal distance, mating patterns, and age of wild mosquito populations. Pluses: No fitness costs for marking mosquitoes for a mark-recapture experiment and the dye transfers to females through the seminal fluids of marked males ; Minuses: Only demonstrated in males so far, probably works for females (?)

New and exciting technologies have been developed to improve our approach to detecting and monitoring infectious mosquitoes. What other methods are out there? What methods don’t exist yet that would improve our understanding of vectors and vector-borne disease? Have any VectorBiters tried any of these methods yet?