Sterile Insect Technique: Investigating the Impact of Larval Diet and Ionizing Radiation on the Mosquito Bacterial Microbiota

The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is a species-specific and effective insect population control technique that has the potential to be an alternative to chemical insecticides. The use of the SIT for mosquito population control is currently in development. An obstacle to the success of this technique is the decline in fitness of radiation-sterilized males. We propose that radiation exposure and specific larval diets change the bacterial microbiota of sterile adult male Aedes aegypti. To test this, we reared larvae on either a cat or fish food diet, irradiated the pupae, and isolated DNA from adult male abdomens three days post-irradiation. We then used 16s rRNA sequencing technology to characterize the bacterial microbiota. Our findings show for the first time in mosquitoes that larval diets change the effect of ionizing radiation on the adult bacterial microbiota.