Novel method using mice to infect <I>Aedes aegypti</I> with dengue virus type 2

Dengue virus infection manifests in three distinct forms of diseases in human: dengue fever, dengue hemorrhagic fever, and dengue shock syndrome. It is a fatal disease with no vaccine available and breakage of transmission is still the core of prevention. The study of dengue viral transmission by mosquitoes is hindered due to the lack of affordable animal model. In general, mice as an animal model are used as simple and inexpensive systems, however they are not susceptible to dengue virus infection, and therefore fail to cause viremia to mice following the inoculation of the virus. We applied the method appeared in Yamanaka and Konishi (2009) to create artificial viremia in mice. K562 cells infected with dengue virus type 2 were incubated with D4-I-1D6 monoclonal antibody, and then the treated cells were intraperitoneally inoculated in a mouse. Then 5 hrs post infection, Aedes aegypti had a chance to engorge a blood meal from the mouse. Most of the mosquitoes fed blood meal completely. They were harvested in 14 days post infection, and were proved to have high infection rate by RT-LAMP and RT-PCR. The newly developed technique resembles nature of transmission compared to artificial feeding technique. And also the method may be used for further analyses of the infected mosquitoes by using a next generation sequencer.