Alexander S. Raikhel

TL;DR: A draft sequence of the genome of Aedes aegypti, the primary vector for yellow fever and dengue fever, which at approximately 1376 million base pairs is about 5 times the size of the genomes of the malaria vector Anopheles gambiae was presented in this paper.

TL;DR: In insects, accumulation of yolk, or vitellogenesis, is a heterosynthetic pro­ cess, in which an extraovarian tissue, the fat body, produces yolk protein precursors, and the role of endocytosis in yolk deposition in insect oocytes is implicated.

TL;DR: Analysis of immune signaling pathways and response modules reveals both conservative and rapidly evolving features associated with different functional gene categories and particular aspects of immune reactions, suggesting how innate immunity may have evolved.

TL;DR: The results indicate that a symbiotic bacterium can manipulate the host defense system to facilitate its own persistent infection, resulting in a compromise of the mosquito's ability to host human pathogens.

TL;DR: Though vertebrate VgRs, insect VgR/YPRs, and LDLR-related proteins/megalins all accommodate one cluster of eight Class A repeats, fingerprint analysis of the repeats in these clusters indicate they are not directly homologous with one another, but have undergone differing histories of duplications, deletions, and exon shuffling so that their apparent similarity is superficial.