Fig. 2

The midgut epithelium of adult female mosquitoes shows conserved post-emergence maturation, and dynamic adjustment to changing physiological conditions. Experimental design: A Emerging mosquitoes received EdU in pupal water (maturation experiment). Five-day old mosquitos received EdU in a blood meal (blood feeding experiment), a sucrose-baited suspension of Pseudomonas entomophila (infection experiment) or neither (sugar feeding baseline experiment). All were maintained on 10% sucrose supplemented with EdU for 72 h prior to dissection. Guts were treated with a Click-iT cocktail to label EdU (green) and stained with an anti-PH3 antibody (red) and DAPI (blue). Representative images of the posterior midgut region of interest (ROI) for each condition in all mosquito species are shown in (B) (scale bar = 50 µm). To illustrate the amplitude of responses to different stimuli in a single mosquito species, the percentages of EdU-positive cells in the posterior midgut ROI in Aedes aegypti across all conditions are shown in (C). Values on top indicate mean values and error bars are SEM. Statistics: one-way ANOVA, P < 0.001. A full graph containing all comparations by species is shown in Fig. S5. Percentages of EdU-positive cells in the ROI, relative to the percentages in the sugar-fed condition are shown for maturing (D), blood-fed (E), and infected (F) females of all species. Results are from at least three biological replicates. Values on top indicate mean values, and error bars are SEM. Statistics: Mann–Whitney test; *, **, and *** respectively indicate P values of < 0.05, < 0.001, and < 0.001