The characterizing daily changes of metabolites in Northern house mosquito, Culex pipiens

Most insects living in temperate regions show robust seasonal responses, including acquiring large stores of nutrients so that they can survive prolonged periods without access to food. Insects use the short days of fall to predict winter’s arrival and enter diapause, a programmed developmental arrest. The adult females of the Northern house mosquito, Culex pipiens, enter reproductive diapause in winter. The previous studies using several insects revealed that circadian clock genes seem to be involved in measuring photoperiod, but the mechanism has been still unclear. How do insects determine whether the daylength is long or short? To solve this question, we used Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) to measure daily changes in the metabolites of diapausing and non-diapausing wild-type Cx. pipiens as well as mosquitoes that lacked a key circadian clock gene (cycle). Although our analyses are ongoing, we anticipate that our results will reveal how diapausing mosquitoes are able to dramatically increase their fat stores, as well as how ablating normal clock gene function may lead to largescale disruptions to the metabolome of Cx. pipiens.