Samuel Stanford Chan Rund

• PhD
• VectorBase.org / VEuPath.org at University of Notre Dame

Vector-borne diseases pose a persistent and increasing challenge to human, animal, and agricultural systems globally. Mathematical modeling frameworks incorporating vector trait responses are powerful tools to assess risk and predict vector-borne disease impacts. Developing these frameworks and the reliability of their predictions hinge on the avai...

The Asian malaria vector Anopheles stephensi is invading Africa, requiring it to adapt to novel climates and ecosystems. In part, this may be facilitated by An. stephensi’s poorly understood seasonal behavioural plasticity in flight timing, leading to earlier biting activity in cold Asian winters and later biting times in the warm summer. Changes i...

Africa and the United States are both large, heterogeneous geographies with a diverse range of ecologies, climates and mosquito species diversity which contribute to disease transmission and nuisance biting. In the United States, mosquito control is nationally, and regionally coordinated and in so much as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provi...

The Eukaryotic Pathogen, Vector and Host Informatics Resource (VEuPathDB, https://veupathdb.org) is a Bioinformatics Resource Center funded by the National Institutes of Health with additional funding from the Wellcome Trust. VEuPathDB supports >600 organisms that comprise invertebrate vectors, eukaryotic pathogens (protists and fungi) and relevant...

A growing body of information on vector-borne diseases has arisen as increasing research focus has been directed towards the need for anticipating risk, optimizing surveillance, and understanding the fundamental biology of vector-borne diseases to direct control and mitigation efforts. The scope and scale of this information, in the form of data, c...

Mosquitoes and other blood feeding arthropods are vectors of pathogens causing serious human diseases, such as Plasmodium spp. (malaria), Wuchereria bancrofti (lymphatic filariasis), Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease), and viruses causing dengue, Zika, West Nile, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Among the most effective strategies for the prevention...

The Eukaryotic Pathogen, Vector and Host Informatics Resource (VEuPathDB, https://veupathdb.org) represents the 2019 merger of VectorBase with the EuPathDB projects. As a Bioinformatics Resource Center funded by the National Institutes of Health, with additional support from the Welllcome Trust, VEuPathDB supports >500 organisms comprising inverteb...

Aedes aegypti mosquito is a major vector of arboviral disease. Here, we report that the biting behavior of normally daytime active anthropophilic Ae. aegypti mosquitoes on human hosts is abnormally increased at night following exposure to artificial light at night (ALAN). Biting was examined using a human host assay where caged mosquitoes were expo...

Infection can dramatically alter behavioural and physiological traits as hosts become sick and subsequently return to health. Such “sickness behaviours” include disrupted circadian rhythms in both locomotor activity and body temperature. Host sickness behaviours vary in pathogen species-specific manners but the influence of pathogen intraspecific v...

The malaria mosquito, Anopheles stephensi, and other mosquitoes modulate their biology to match the time-of-day. In the present work, we used a non-hypothesis driven approach (untargeted proteomics) to identify proteins in mosquito tissue, and then quantified the relative abundance of the identified proteins from An. stephensi bodies. Using these q...

Background Biological rhythms allow organisms to compartmentalise and coordinate behaviours, physiologies, and cellular processes with the predictable daily rhythms of their environment. There is increasing recognition that the biological rhythms of mosquitoes that vector parasites are important for global health. For example, whether perturbations...

Members of the Culex pipiens complex differ in physiological traits that facilitate their survival in diverse environments. Assortative mating within the complex occurs in some regions where autogenous (the ability to lay a batch of eggs without a blood meal) and anautogenous populations are sympatric, and differences in mating behaviors may be inv...

Arthropods play a dominant role in natural and human-modified terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. Spatially-explicit arthropod population time-series data are crucial for statistical or mathematical models of these dynamics and assessment of their veterinary, medical, agricultural, and ecological impacts. Such data have been collected world-wide for ov...

Despite the major impact of mosquitoes on human health, knowledge gaps exist regarding their natural population dynamics. Even the most basic information—such as spatiotemporal abundance—is mostly unavailable. In the USA, municipalities have created agencies for mosquito control and monitoring, yet no national open-access repository for mosquito su...

Despite the major impact of mosquitoes on human health, knowledge gaps exist regarding their natural population dynamics. Even the most basic information-such as spatiotemporal abundance-is mostly unavailable. In the USA, municipalities have created agencies for mosquito control and monitoring, yet no national open-access repository for mosquito su...

Daily rhythms in behaviour, physiology and molecular processes are expected to enable organisms to appropriately schedule activities according to consequences of the daily rotation of the Earth. For parasites, this includes capitalizing on periodicity in transmission opportunities and for hosts/vectors, this may select for rhythms in immune defence...

Arthropods play a dominant role in natural and human-modified terrestrial ecosystem dynamics. Spatially-explicit population time-series are crucial for statistical or mathematical models of these dynamics and assessment of their veterinary, medical, agricultural, and ecological impacts. Arthropod data have been collected world-wide for over a centu...

Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems (sUAS) are an emerging application area for many industries including surveillance, agriculture monitoring, and vector-borne disease control. With drastically lower costs and increasing performance and autonomy, future application evolution will more than likely include the use of sUAS swarms. Several largely success...

That periodicity in the biting activity of mosquito vectors explains why malaria parasites have evolved rhythms in cycles of asexual replication in the host's blood was proposed almost 50 years ago. Yet, tests of this hypothesis have proved inconclusive. Using the rodent malaria Plasmodium chabaudi, we examine rhythms in the density and infectivity...

According to the World Health Organization, every year more than a billion people are infected with vector-borne diseases worldwide. There are no vaccines for most vector-borne diseases. Vector control, therefore, is often the only way to prevent outbreaks. Despite the major impact of vectors on human health, knowledge gaps exist regarding their na...

Circadian rhythms enable organisms to synchronise the processes underpinning survival and reproduction to anticipate daily changes in the external environment. Recent work shows that daily (circadian) rhythms also enable parasites to maximise fitness in the context of ecological interactions with their hosts. Because parasite rhythms matter for the...

Circadian rhythms enable organisms to synchronise the processes underpinning survival and reproduction to anticipate daily changes in the external environment. Recent work shows that daily (circadian) rhythms also enable parasites to maximise fitness in the context of ecological interactions with their hosts. Because parasite rhythms matter for the...

Genome biology approaches have made enormous contributions to our understanding of biological rhythms, particularly in identifying outputs of the clock, including RNAs, proteins, and metabolites, whose abundance oscillates throughout the day. These methods hold significant promise for future discovery, particularly when combined with computational...

Background Host-seeking behaviours in anopheline mosquitoes are time-of-day specific, with a greater propensity for nocturnal biting. We investigated how a short exposure to light presented during the night or late day can inhibit biting activity and modulate flight activity behaviour. Results Anopheles gambiae (s.s.), maintained on a 12:12 LD cyc...

Viruses are major evolutionary drivers of insect immune systems. Much of our knowledge of insect immune responses derives from experimental infections using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Most experiments, however, employ lethal pathogen doses through septic injury, frequently overwhelming host physiology. While this approach has revealed s...

Viruses are major evolutionary drivers of insect immune systems. Much of our knowledge of insect immune responses derives from experimental infections using the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. Most experiments, however, employ lethal pathogen doses through septic injury, frequently overwhelming host physiology. While this approach has revealed a...

Background Marine and freshwater zooplankton exhibit daily rhythmic patterns of behavior and physiology which may be regulated directly by the light:dark (LD) cycle and/or a molecular circadian clock. One of the best-studied zooplankton taxa, the freshwater crustacean Daphnia, has a 24 h diel vertical migration (DVM) behavior whereby the organism t...

The 24-h day involves cycles in environmental factors that impact organismal fitness. This is thought to select for organisms to regulate their temporal biology accordingly, through circadian and diel rhythms. In addition to rhythms in abiotic factors (such as light and temperature), biotic factors, including ecological interactions, also follow da...

Background There is a renewed effort to develop novel malaria control strategies as even well-implemented existing malaria control tools may fail to block transmission in some regions. Currently, transgenic implementations of the sterile insect technique (SIT) such as the release of insects with a dominant lethal, homing endonuclease genes, or flig...

Background: The mosquito species Aedes aegypti is the primary vector of many arboviral diseases, including dengue and yellow fevers, that are responsible for a large worldwide health burden. The biological rhythms of mosquitoes regulate many of the physiological processes and behaviors that influence the transmission of these diseases. For insight...

Insect physiology and behavior are regulated on a 24 hr basis by an endogenous circadian clock and by the light:dark (LD) cycle. In Anopheles gambiae, the major malaria vector, daily rhythms in flight activity, mating, sugar- and blood-feeding, and egg lying are reported. Such behaviors are further modulated by olfaction. The objective of the curre...

We recently characterized 24-hr daily rhythmic patterns of gene expression in Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes. These include numerous odorant binding proteins (OBPs), soluble odorant carrying proteins enriched in olfactory organs. Here we demonstrate that multiple rhythmically expressed genes including OBPs and takeout proteins, involved in regulating...

Supp Info

Supplementary Dataset 1

Supplementary Dataset 2

Abstract Many arboviral proteins are phosphorylated in infected mammalian cells, but it is unknown if the same phosphorylation events occur when insects are similarly infected. One of the mammalian kinases responsible for phosphorylation, protein kinase G (PKG), has been implicated in the behavior of multiple nonvector insects, but is unstudied in...

Background Mosquitoes exhibit 24 hr rhythms in flight activity, feeding, reproduction and development. To better understand the molecular basis for these rhythms in the nocturnal malaria vector Anopheles gambiae, we have utilized microarray analysis on time-of-day specific collections of mosquitoes over 48 hr to explore the coregulation of gene exp...

Agent-based modeling has been well received in the simulation community. Complex systems are simulated by many autonomous agents whose behavior is defined by a conceptual model. However, the model can be improperly implemented or misinterpreted resulting in an implementation that does not reflect the conceptual rules. It is imperative that the impl...

Anopheles gambiae, the primary African malaria vector, is currently speciating into two incipient species, the so-called "molecular forms" M and S. While some geographic areas may contain only one form, in many areas both forms are found coexisting, but reproductively isolated. It appears that spatial segregation of mating swarms may contribute sig...

Vector-borne diseases account for 16% of the global infectious disease burden (WHO, 2004). Many of these debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases are transmitted between human hosts by mosquitoes. Mosquito-targeted intervention methods have controlled or eliminated mosquito-borne diseases from many regions of the world but regions of constant tran...

Niemann-Pick Disease, type C (NPC) is a fatal, neurodegenerative, lysosomal storage disorder. It is a rare disease with broad phenotypic spectrum and variable age of onset. These issues make it difficult to develop a universally accepted clinical outcome measure to assess urgently needed therapies. To this end, clinical investigators have defined e...

Vector-borne diseases account for 16% of the global infectious disease burden WHO, 2004. Many of these debilitating and sometimes fatal diseases are transmitted between human hosts by mosquitoes. Mosquito-targeted intervention methods have controlled or eliminated mosquito-borne diseases from many regions of the world but regions of constant transm...

Anopheles gambiae, the primary African vector of malaria parasites, exhibits numerous rhythmic behaviors including flight activity, swarming, mating, host seeking, egg laying, and sugar feeding. However, little work has been performed to elucidate the molecular basis for these daily rhythms. To study how gene expression is regulated globally by die...

There are multiple agent-based simulations investigating population and behavior dynamics of mosquito vectors. Some of these simulations model intervention pressures on the mosquito population to predict the impact of vector control strategies. These are complex models that can accurately characterize mosquitoes and simulate the effects of various...