I am planning an oral infection of mosquitoes with dengue virus and wonder what could be the impact of viremia (calculated in pfu here) on the resulting infection in mosquitoes.
I searched the literature but could not find a paper that directly assessed the parameter.
Thank you very much for your input
Viremia of the animal (or viral titer of the artificial blood meal) is critical to oral exposure experiments with mosquitoes and dengue. In general, a threshold phenomenon is observed where with less than 100,000 pfu/ml (artificial bloodmeal titer) infection of the insect is tenuous. This is likely a function of the probability of virus ingestion and not a true biological threshold. Interestingly, we saw in a murine model of dengue transmission that mosquitoes could acquire the infection at much lower titers - albeit with lower probabilities.
Article Development of a transmission model for dengue virus
It is really determinant for mosquito infection, you can check on some experimental results on
http://www.worldcat.org/title/determinants-of-dengue-type-2-virus-infection-in-the-mosquito-aedes-aegypti/oclc/76894989
depending on your mosquito strains (lab vs Wild-Type) and the DENV genotypes/strains that you are using, it will influence your mosquito infection, dissemination and transmission rates. In our recent study, we manage to obtain high infection and dissemination rates when mosquitoes are fed directly on dengue NS1 positive patients (e.g. 1.5x10^3 PFU/ml using BHK cells)
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