[en] Malaria remains a public health challenge. A child dies of malaria every two minutes in the world. The pathogen agent (Plasmodium) is transmitted to humans by Anopheles mosquitos’ bites including Anopheles gambiae sensus lacto (s.l.) (Giles, 1902) as the main vector in Sub-Saharan Africa. A review of the literature reveals that in West Africa and particularly in Burkina Faso, this vector has developed resistance to the main insecticide used for vector control. In addition, the
environment such as agriculture practices including pesticide use and climate (both temperature and rainfall) increase insecticide pressure and could also influence the abundance, diversity of mosquitoes and the effectiveness of their control as human disease vector. Firstly, a genomic approach was carried out by targeting three climatic zones and two agricultural pressure conditions, namely the major presence of cotton crops or not. This study showed that the network of phylogenetic tree haplotypes did not reveal any distinct genetic structure related to climatic or
agricultural conditions. Similarly, an absence of gene flow and population differentiation and an excess of rare mutations have been revealed. Then the microbiota of the midgut was investigated by a metagenomic approach and revealed that proteobacteria (97.2%) was the dominant bacterial phylum. The most abundant genera were Enterobacter (32.8%) followed by Aeromonas (29.8%), Pseudomonas (11.8%), Acinetobacter (5.9%) and Thorsellia (2.2%). Seven bacterial species
refractories to Plasmodium infection have been detected and already proposed as promising symbiotic agents for control by para transgenesis. Finally, a proteomic analysis was developed and allowed to find an almost similar distribution of the biological functions of proteins identified according to climatic conditions or agricultural practices (insecticide pressure). No systematic impact of the diversity of climatic regions or targeted insecticide pressures was identified following the analysis of the expression variations of the proteomes studied (1182 proteins identified and 648 involved in targeted metabolic pathways). This study provides the first proteomic characterization of whole individuals of An. gambiae in Burkina Faso. Further in-depth research should be considered in order to successfully strengthen vector control strategies and understand the interactions between vector mosquitoes and their environment in different ecological niches.
