Dissection of Midgut and Salivary Glands from Ae. aegypti Mosquitoes

My name is Judy Coleman, and I’m part of the James Lab. Here at UCI, we’re in the Department of Molecular Biology and biochemistry. Today I’m going to be dissecting Eptide mosquitoes and we’ll be dissecting the salivary gland in the midgut.

We are interested in these specific tissues because they are very involved in the pathway of the virus and the parasites. When a mosquito ingest a blood meal, the parasite virus goes into the salivary gland, and from the salivary gland it goes into the midgut. It goes through the midgut epi epithelium, and then into the hum lymph.

And that travels through the mosquito’s bloodstream, the hemo lymph, and into the salivary gland. There it resides until it’s Ready to take another blood meal. All right.

What I’m gonna be doing now first is I’m gonna be Dissecting the mid gut from the eighties aegypti. First of all, I need to put on one times PBS. This is a buffer that is, is our good physiological conditions.

So we put it on the slide and I have a cold in order to keep the mosquito from flying away while we’re dissecting, so that I will take the ver midgut to get a midgut, I have to point the mosquito. I put the my, I use a probe that I’ve made and I put the probe through the thorax of the mosquito. Once I put it under the microscope, I pick up the forceps, I take the very end of the abdomen suction, and I pull it off and I leave the midgut behind.

So the midget’s, the midget’s right there, and I will pull that off. There it is. There’s the isolated midgut.

Right now we’re gonna be dissecting the salivary Glands out of the eighties of GT eye. And this procedure I use two different probes and the forceps. I have one probe here that has a straight pin, and I use this to grab the mosquito.

I use one probe that has an angled pin, and I use this to push the ate lens out of the mosquito. The forceps I use to pull the head off the mosquito before I take the salivary glands out. When I take the mosquito outta the petri dish, I poke it in the thorax.

It’s easier to, for me to pull, to get the, the glands out if I can remove the legs. So I just do that by hand. I then put the mosquito in the buffer and, and I pull her head off, and I push on the thorax, and I push out the salivary gland.

Here’s a good look at the salivary gland, and there’s a look at both parts of The pair of salivating Glands. We have just finished dissecting salivating glands amid guts out of the eighties, gyp eye mosquito. We look at this material on a molecular level in order to interfere with the pathway of the virus Or the parasite within the mosquito.