While the bacterial gut flora of the mosquito vector Anopheles has been clearly linked with its vectorial competence, its potential impact on insecticide resistance is understudied. Insecticide resistance in mosquitoes being prevalent in the field, we generated a deltamethrin-resistant Anopheles coluzzii laboratory strain to model this interaction with the microbiome. We found that proliferation of the gut bacterial flora after blood feeding enhanced the susceptibility of the A. coluzzii resistant strain to deltamethrin. Consistently, bacteria microbiome depletion through antibiotic treatment of fully susceptible Anopheles strains led to 50% of mosquitoes becoming tolerant. Mosquito gut extracted from ATB treated females was transferred via blood feeding to susceptible strain and led insecticide tolerance. 16S sequencing identified to main taxa that might be responsible for the tolerance phenotype. The project aims at identifying the complete genome sequence of these two bacteria OTUs.
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