Fertility decline in Aedes aegypti mosquitoes is associated with reduced maternal transcript deposition and does not depend on female age

Female mosquitoes undergo multiple rounds of reproduction known as gonotrophic cycles. A gonotrophic cycle spans the period from blood meal intake to egg laying. Nutrients from vertebrate host blood are necessary for completing egg development. During oogenesis, a female pre-packages mRNA into her oocytes, and these maternal transcripts drive the first two hours of embryonic development before zygotic genome activation. In this study, we profiled transcriptional changes in 1-2 hour-old Aedes aegypti embryos across two gonotrophic cycles. We found that homeotic genes which are regulators of embryogenesis are downregulated in embryos from the second gonotrophic cycle. Interestingly, embryos produced by Ae. aegypti females progressively reduced their ability to hatch as the number of gonotrophic cycles increased. We show that this fertility decline is due to increased reproductive output and not the mosquitoes’ age. Moreover, we found a similar decline in fertility and fecundity across thr..., Transcriptomic data processing and analysis
RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) data for 1-2hrs old wild-type Ae. aegypti embryos were retrieved from the transcriptome reported in our previous study [1]. Each library read was trimmed to remove the adapter sequence and then mapped to gene models from the AaegL5.0 genome. Upon mapping, transcript level abundance was determined from mapped reads using tximport. Principal component and differential gene expression analyses were performed on read counts using R’s shiny DEBrowser. Differential expression was calculated using Deseq2 at a corrected FDR of α < 0.01. Gene ontology (GO) enrichment was performed on differentially expressed genes at α < 0.01 using the bioinformatics resources on vectorbase.org, and redundant or obsolete GO terms were removed.  
Fecundity and fertility assays
To determine fecundity, the number of eggs deposited per female, 5–7-day old, mated females were starved on water overnight and then provided with a blood meal to re..., , # Fertility decline in *Aedes aegypti* mosquitoes is associated with reduced maternal transcript deposition and does not depend on female age

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mkkwh717f](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.mkkwh717f)

The dataset includes transcriptome analysis of *Aedes aegypti* early embryos. The raw sequencing reads of this dataset are available for download at the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA) and are associated with BioProject ID PRJNA957289. The dataset also contains information on *Aedes aegypti* and *Aedes albopictus* mosquito egg deposition rate and egg hatch rate over three reproductive cycles (gonotrophic cycles). The data is presented on an Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs:

* RNA-seq sample metadata (data related to Figure 2)
* RNA-seq read counts (data related to Figure 2)
* Downregulated genes (data related to Figure 2)
* Upregulated genes (data related to Figure 2)
* Figure 1b (raw data presented in figure 1b, percent eggs hatched/female for *Ae...