NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – A researcher at the University of California, Riverside has received a five-year, $1.8 million grant to produce fine-scale recombination rate maps for the African malaria mosquito in research aimed at preventing transmission of the disease.
The grant from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases was awarded to Bradley White, an assistant professor of entomology at UC Riverside, whose lab has developed a high-throughput protocol using genomics and bioinformatics methods to map recombination "breakpoints" in the mosquito, Anopheles gambiae.
According to the abstract of the grant contained in the National Institutes of Health's database, White will use next-generation sequencing techniques to create high-resolution recombination rate maps for female and male An. Gambiae and to systematically determine the effect of inversions on recombination.
"Our quantitative data on recombination will aid in the design, implementation, and evaluation of control strategies targeting An. Gambiae, while also greatly improving the power of population genetics and whole-genome association studies in this species," the researchers said in the grant abstract.
The grant helps support two postdoctoral researchers, three graduate students, and two undergraduate students in White's lab, UC Riverside said.