Displaying items by tag: brian wiegmann

This story was originally published on Phys.org and authored by Mick Kulikowski, Director of Strategic Communications and Media Relations at NC State University

Raleigh, NC — Researchers at North Carolina State University and global collaborators have mapped the mosquito’s tree of life, a major step toward understanding important traits, such as how the insects choose their hosts, feed on blood and spread disease. The findings will help researchers make better predictions to model disease transmission and understand what makes some mosquitoes better disease carriers than others.

The research suggests mosquito evolution over the past 200 million years mirrors the Earth’s history of shifting land masses and changing host organisms, said Dr. Brian Wiegmann, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Entomology at NC State and corresponding author of a paper describing the mosquito family tree. 

The William Neal Reynolds Professorship is one of the highest distinctions available to NCSU faculty members.The Reynolds Professorships were established in 1950 by William Neal Reynolds, a long-time president and board chairman of the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, to recognize and support outstanding faculty achievement in research, teaching and extension.

“This ongoing project builds a big-data resource that mines the academic literature with published observations of the sources of blood mosquitoes drink, from animals as diverse as fish to humans,” Wiegmann said. “It focuses explicitly on data collection to infer aspects of mosquito biology in a contextualized way. That means linking up the family, or phylogenetic, tree with the narrative of life on Earth: geologic history, climate history and organism history.”