Targeting the Yellow-Fever Mosquito

Mackenzie Yedlin, a doctoral candidate, The Rockefeller University, will speak on "Choreographing Reproduction: Redefining Sex Steroid Hormone Mechanisms in Aedes aegypti Mosquitoes" at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology seminar on Wednesday, Oct. 7.

She will speak at 12:10 p.m. in 122 Briggs Hall. Her seminar also will be on Zoom. The link: https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.

"Ecdysone, a steroid hormone derived from cholesterol, is essential for mosquito reproduction, namely blood meal-induced oogenesis in Aedes aegypti," Yedlin writes in her abstract. "The current model posits that a vertebrate blood meal stimulates ovarian ecdysone synthesis, followed by free diffusion of ecdysone through the hemolymph. Transporters take up ecdysone into the fat body, where its hydroxylation into 20E enables transcription of yolk proteins."

"However, in the absence of a blood meal, the amount of exogenous 20E required to induce egg development exceeds its physiological concentration by up to five orders of magnitude," she points out. "This discrepancy forms the basis of our scientific question, leading to two potentially interconnected hypotheses to explain how steroid hormones regulate mosquito reproductive biology. The first is that an unidentified, chemically modified ecdysteroid acts as the physiological substrate for uptake into fat cells during Aedes aegypti reproduction. The second is that additional blood meal-induced transcriptional changes, possibly related to hormone transport, are required for mosquito egg development. Our work aims to tease apart this foundational sex hormone chemistry and form a more complete understanding of ecdysteroid transport into fat cells during mosquito reproduction."

Yedlin holds a bachelor's degree (2018) in neuroscience, summa cum laude, from Middlebury College, Vermont, where she also studied the history of art and architecture and where she began dancing with the World Dance Troupe.

In 2021, Yedlin enrolled in The Rockefeller doctoral program, where she conducts independent research studying a mosquito hormone and its essential role in reproduction as a vector control strategy. She works in the Leslie Vosshall Lab of Neurogenetics and Behavior.

Yedlin is a National Institutes of Health Genetics and Cell Biology Predoctoral Training Grant Recipient (2021-2023), and served as a Women and Science Graduate Fellow (2021-2022).

For any Zoom or technical issues, contact seminar coordinator Lisa Baik, assistant professor of insect biology, at [email protected].