Understanding Dengue in a Changing Climate: 2024 YPS Grant Project Insight
Dengue virus is reaching more people than ever, with a troubling and dramatic rise in cases over the past two decades. In 2024 alone, the worst year on record, more than 14 million cases and 10,000 deaths were reported. This represents a tenfold increase over the past decades, surpassing even 2023, which was also a record-breaking year. With limited resources to control outbreaks on a large scale, it’s essential to have the best possible understanding of the underlying factors of disease transmission.
Researchers in the Vogels Lab.
To tackle this challenge, researchers are looking closely at the many factors that influence transmission. Outside temperature, conditions inside the mosquito, and even microbes mosquitoes carry can all affect how the virus spreads.
A key piece to the puzzle is how the virus changes over time. Like all viruses, dengue accumulates small genetic changes, or mutations, as it replicates. Most of these changes have little effect, but some can help the virus survive better, spread more easily, or adapt to new environments. Understanding which mutations matter, and under what conditions, is critical for understanding how dengue might behave in the future.
A research team funded by the 2024 YPS Grant, “Dengue Virus Evolution and Changing Environments,” is using an innovative lab technique called deep mutational scanning to rapidly test thousands of possible mutations in the virus and see which ones help it survive or spread under different conditions.
“There’s a lot more transmission going on, and there are a lot of nuances of transmission that we don’t understand,” said Chantal Vogels, Assistant Professor of Epidemiology and the Principal Investigator (PI) of the project. “We have an experimental method that we can use to study evolution in the lab and that enables us to characterize the function of mutations under different conditions.”
The collaborative research team is studying Wolbachia, a bacterium people have introduced into mosquitoes. In mosquito populations, Wolbachia interferes with how dengue virus replicates inside the insect, making it less likely that the mosquito will transmit the virus to humans. Because it spreads through mosquito populations over time, Wolbachia has emerged as a promising tool for dengue control. However, while this strategy is already being used in some regions, there are still questions about how well it will work in changing (warming) climate conditions and whether the virus could develop resistance to the bacterium.
“This is a innovative application of how deep mutational scanning can be used,” Vogels said. “Temperature is a really important factor because at higher temperatures, Wolbachia doesn’t do very well. If we can identify which virus variations have an advantage under different temperature scenarios, we can better assess risks and inform mosquito control strategies.”
As dengue spreads into new regions, this research could help public health teams anticipate how the virus will respond to changing environments and design smart, durable strategies to reduce its impact on millions of people.
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