Insecticide resistance in malaria mosquitoes: Monitoring a multigenic and multiallelic phenotype.
Malaria control still relies heavily on the use of insecticides to kill the mosquitoes that carry the disease, but the effectiveness of these interventions is threatened by the evolution of resistance to insecticides in these mosquitoes. Understanding the genetics and dynamics of this evolution is crucial for the development of effective genetic screening for resistance, to inform the efficient choice of optimal insecticidal products. By detecting genetic associations with resistance across different populations, we have shown that resistance involves a great variety of genes, which are not consistently involved across different mosquito populations, and that even within genomic regions with consistent phenotypic associations, there is huge variability in the mutations causing resistance both within and between populations. Such diversity poses a challenge for the development of effective monitoring platforms.