Diet-induced nutritional stress may affect mosquito vectorial capacity through its impact on life history traits, infection susceptibility and immunity. However, how these three factors are affected by both larval and adult nutritional stress remains unclear. Here, we manipulated mosquito diet to create two levels of nutrition at both larval and adult stages and evaluated the effects of low nutrition (nutritional stress) on Aedes aegypti. We demonstrate that larval and adult nutritional stress negatively affected adult size and survival, respectively, and synergistically reduced the fecundity. The ingestion of an infectious blood meal did not independently, but rather interactively affect mosquito survival with nutritional stress, while it both independently and interactively affected fecundity. Mosquitoes that experienced nutritional stress as adults, but not as larvae were more susceptible to dengue virus infection after ingesting an infectious blood meal, but developed lower viral titers than their unstressed counterparts. Smaller mosquitoes were also more likely to become infected. Mosquito immune response to dengue virus infection appears to be suppressed by both larval and adult nutritional stress with distinct involvement of key immune signaling pathways. Overall, our findings demonstrate a crucial role of nutritional stress in mosquito life history traits, infection outcome and immune response which in turn influence vectorial capacity for dengue virus. Since nutrition is often limited in natural settings, our findings underscore the critical role that mosquito nutrition plays in driving the transmission of mosquito-borne diseases.
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