Back

Dengue virus susceptibility in Aedes aegypti linked to natural cytochrome P450 variants

Merkling, S. H.; Couderc, E.; Crist, A. B.; Dabo, S.; Daron, J.; Jupatanakul, N.; Burckbuchler, M.; Sismeiro, O.; Legendre, R.; Pain, A.; Varet, H.; Jiolle, D.; Ayala, D.; Paupy, C.; Marois, E.; Lambrechts, L.

2025-02-24 microbiology
10.1101/2025.02.24.639860 bioRxiv
Show abstract

The mosquito Aedes aegypti is the primary vector for dengue virus (DENV), which infects millions of people annually. Variability in DENV susceptibility among wild Ae. aegypti populations is governed by genetic factors, but specific causal variants are unknown. Here, we identify a cytochrome P450-encoding gene (CYP4G15) whose variants drive differences in DENV susceptibility in a natural Ae. aegypti population. CYP4G15 is transiently upregulated in DENV-resistant midguts, while knockdown increases susceptibility, and transgenic overexpression enhances resistance. A naturally occurring 18-base-pair promoter deletion reduces CYP4G15 expression and confers higher DENV susceptibility. The unexpected role of a cytochrome P450 in DENV susceptibility challenges the long-standing focus on canonical immune pathways and opens new avenues for understanding antiviral defense and DENV transmission in mosquitoes.

Published in Nature Communications (predicted rank #5) · training set

Matching journals

The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.