Sugar feeding enhances gut immunity and protects against arboviral infection in the mosquito vector Aedes aegypti

Abstract

As mosquito females require a blood meal to reproduce, they can act as vectors of numerous pathogens, such as arboviruses (e.g. Zika, dengue and chikungunya viruses), which constitute a substantial worldwide public health burden. In addition to blood meals, mosquito females can also take sugar meals to get carbohydrates for their energy reserves. It is now recognised that diet is a key regulator of health and disease outcome through interactions with the immune system. However, it has been mostly studied in humans and model organisms. So far, the impact of sugar feeding on mosquito immunity and in turn, how this could affect vector competence for arboviruses has not been analysed. Here, we show that sugar feeding increases and maintains antiviral immunity in the digestive tract of the main arbovirus vector Aedes aegypti. Our data demonstrate that the gut microbiota does not mediate the sugar-induced immunity but partly inhibits it. Importantly, sugar intake prior to an arbovirus-infected blood meal further protects females against infection with arboviruses from different families, highlighting a broad antiviral action of sugar. Sugar feeding blocks arbovirus initial infection and dissemination from the gut, lowers infection prevalence and intensity, thereby decreasing transmission potential of female mosquitoes. Overall, our findings uncover a crucial role of sugar feeding in mosquito antiviral immunity and vector competence for arboviruses. Since Ae. aegypti almost exclusively feed on blood in some natural settings, our findings suggest that this could increase the spread of mosquito-borne arboviral diseases.