Research capacity for the implementation of genetic control of mosquitoes

INFRAVEC project integrates in a multi-centre European Infrastructure a number of academic and industrial laboratories operating in the field of mosquito biology, genetics, epidemiology, genetic engineering, ecology and population biology. The objective is to provide the European scientific community with a formidable leverage to progress in the understanding of mosquito biology and to develop new control measures against vector-borne diseases. A number of laboratory facilities will be integrated within a single operating Infrastructure, which will include: i) the insect mass rearing facilities at the Centro Agricoltura Ambiente in Bologna (Italy); ii) the mosquito genetic manipulation laboratory at Imperial College London (UK); iii) the mosquito confined release facility at the Biotechnology Centre of ISRIM -Terni (Italy) and iv) the bioinformatics suite for data collection software development and information sharing at EMBL-EBI (UK). Networking and research activities have been specifically designed to improve the performance of the Infrastructure and to increase its capacity. They will include the formation of a multi-centre mosquito line repository facility that will collect both genetically manipulated and field-derived mosquitoes, the development of a technology for the high-throughput sorting of mosquitoes on the basis of the expression of fluorescent markers in organs and tissues and the sequencing of 100,000 Ae. albopictus Expressed Sequence Tags (ESTs) to provide the scientific community with the knowledge on genome sequence, conservation and divergence between different mosquito species.