🦟 We've just published the world's first head-to-toe single-cell atlas of the Aedes aegypti mosquito in @CellCellPress! The #MosquitoCellAtlas maps 69 cell types across 19 tissues, revealing surprising biology: mosquitoes taste with their legs (more than we thought), glial cells

Drs David Hall & @Vectorimmunlab highlight @merkling_lab & colleagues’ @CellGenomics article on #mosquito cellular responses in #midgut & #fatbody after #bloodfeeding. #Aedes #aegypti #scRNAseq #Metabolomics @IowaStateU @institutpasteur @univ_paris_cite https://t.co/Yz0jKNEIJK

Celebrating the holiday weekend with another bang! Our work describing roles of TNF signaling on mosquito immune cell function and in limiting malaria parasite infection is now published. Big shout out to @samantsidis and others for their contributions!

Excited to share our latest collaborative work with looking at the role of mosquito immune cells in virus infection. It turns out that these cells actually help disseminate an infection, increasing the potential for virus transmission

I am thrilled to present the Mosquito Cell Atlas! We analyzed 367K nuclei from 19 tissues in male & female mosquitoes, creating a comprehensive resource for vector biology & infectious disease research. Plus we made some surprising discoveries! 🦟🧵 https://t.co/QhkJ3Ylowr 1/n

BIG NEWS! The Mosquito Cell Atlas preprint is live! 🦟🧬 My first senior author paper! Massive and accessible snRNA-seq dataset and a lot of cool mosquito biology. A true collaborative achievement! #MCA https://t.co/FFGCvQZ7sa See @oliwiagoldman thread ⬇️

I am super excited to share our latest review about the effects of blood-feeding and infection on arthropod (mosquitoes and ticks) hemocytes. Huge thanks to @theticklab and my mentor, @Vectorimmunlab, for their efforts in putting this together.. https://t.co/YaXnVk4vOY

🚨Interested in mosquito immunity and genetics? 🚨 We are recruiting for two post-doc positions: 1) Development of genetic tools to study mosquito immune cells https://t.co/A2tuwnbNdV 2) Role of mosquito immune cells in immune recognition and priming https://t.co/ONcTT8GUuU

For the sake of transparency, this particular grant took four submissions and about 3 years to get it across the finish line: -Submission #1: 50th % -Submission #2: 26th % -Submission #3: 29th % -Submission #4: 12th %

Excited to share that I officially received my first R01 today! It's been a long road, one marked by persistence and several grants that narrowly missed the payline. Now to do all of the exciting work that we proposed! I will be hiring, so be on the lookout for job postings!

🎉Congratulations Dr. Ryan Smith @Vectorimmunlab, Iowa State U, for receiving the 2024 ACME Breakthrough in Medical Entomology Award. 🥇The award was presented by outgoing Chair @DrAdrianaTroyo at the awards ceremony during ACME Symposium II @ASTMH #TropMed24, with @hamer_lab

Free alternative to BioRender: BioArt Source 2,000+ science and medical art visuals of high-quality, scientifically accurate vectors, icons, and brushes is freely available within the public domain https://t.co/iCjOQZAKX9

Check out this cool work from @samantsidis and @Vectorimmunlab using An gambiae transgenic lines we helped them create!

Now, this project has been one of my favorites during my postdoc with @Vectorimmunlab . Not only because it brought me stateside but also because I got to use groundbreaking techniques and dive into the world of mosquito immune cells.

While we admit that this is just the beginning, we are excited by the increased resolution it provides in the study of mosquito hemocytes and will continue to build from this foundation of work. Enjoy the read!

We also examine phagocytosis using this methodology and identify cell populations that are either phagocytic or non-phagocytic, including those labeled in our transgenic lines

Then, we used our transgenic reporter lines to define the hemocyte subpopulations labeled by each of our transgenes.

Using imaging flow cytometry, we next examined mosquito hemocyte populations to define a total of 12 subpopulations defined by size, granularity, and morphology.

With some help from @UMDITF, we tested multiple candidate hemocyte promoters to drive fluorescent markers in mosquito immune cells. While not every promoter worked, we did have success with three promoters, SPARC, PPO6, and LRIM15

This has been a goal of mine since I first started working on mosquito hemocytes more than 10 years ago, and has been the culmination of previous proteomics and scRNA-seq studies from our lab.