TEP1 gene can also increase malaria transmission through infected mosquitoes

If you're bitten by an infected mosquito, then malaria, a deadly disease, will be transmitted to you. But you may not know that only female mosquitoes bite. Male mosquitoes feed on sugar but not blood. It is because female mosquitoes need an extra dose of nutrients to produce eggs while males do not. However, it doesn't means male mosquitoes don't matter. New research conducted by researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Infection Biology in Berlin and the CNRS in Strasbourg shows that male mosquitoes are probably more important than what people thought before.
The precondition of a female mosquitoes transmitting malaria is that it has to bite an infected person before. Weeks later it bites a healthy person. Why it is not killed by the deadly disease? Mosquitoes also have an immune system as humans do. So some of the infected female mosquitoes may not transmit the disease because the immune system manage to clear infection. Julien Pompon and Elena Levashina uncovered a new function for a gene known to be important for mosquito resistance to malaria.
The gene, called TEP1, was first identified as an immune gene by Levashina in 2001. It is a major killing factoer in female mosquitoes. Her research group now discovers that TEP1 is also implicated in sperm development in male mosquitoes. The TEP1 was found in mosquitoes testes and research showed that it promotes removal of damaged cells during production of spermatozoa, analogous to how discarding bad fruits helps the growing of healthy ones. Once there was no TEP1, male fertility rates were also decreased. Thus TEP1 is necessary for optimal reproduction. This mechanism is also similar to how the TEP1 can help female mosquitoes to resist malaria.
Although it is absolutely good to figure out what could make mosquitoes reproduce less, there is a tough problem. TEP1 is a variable gene, that is, there are different alleles of it all over the world. Different alleles can be inherited by the mosquito offspring after mating, with one always coming from the mother and another from the father. The group also found that one type of TEP1, the S2 allele, can make male mosquitoes better equipped at removing dead cells during sperm production.
This S2 allele confers susceptibility to malaria. In simple words, the same allele that renders mosquito males more fertile, makes females vulnerable to malaria. It means male mosquitoes that can pass on to their offspring a version of TEP1 that is susceptible to malaria could also be better at reproducing. Here comes the conclusion that TEP1 can increase the rate of malaria transmission.
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