Using Zombie Mosquitos to Make Sense of Mosquito-Borne Viruses
For a mosquito to transmit a disease like Dengue fever or Zika, the virus that causes the disease first has to reproduce in the mosquito’s gut and then travel to its saliva glands. Will Stone, a graduate student in the Intramural Research Program at the National Institutes of Health, keeps mosquitos’ stomachs and saliva glands alive outside their bodies to create ‘zombie’ mosquitos that allow him to study how the Dengue virus gets from one to the other and what happens to it when it exits a mosquito in its saliva. His research could one day lead to methods that help us better control outbreaks of mosquito-related diseases.
Click here to learn more about the research being done in Will’s lab.
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Virus Graduate students Zika Microbiology and infectious disease
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This page was last updated on Wednesday, July 30, 2025