A cryopreservation method to recover laboratory- and field-derived bacterial communities from mosquito larval habitats

Mosquitoes develop in a wide range of aquatic habitats containing highly diverse and variable bacterial communities that shape both larval and adult traits, including the capacity of adult females of some mosquito species to vector disease-causing organisms to humans. However, while most mosquito studies control for host genotype and environmental conditions, the impact of microbiota variation on phenotypic outcomes of mosquitoes is often unaccounted for. The inability to conduct reproducible intra- and inter-laboratory studies of mosquito-microbiota interactions has also greatly limited our ability to identify microbial targets for mosquito-borne disease control. Here, we developed an approach to isolate and cryopreserve bacterial communities derived from lab- and field-based larval-rearing environments of the yellow fever mosquito Aedes aegypti–a primary vector of dengue, Zika, and chikungunya viruses. We then validated the use of our approach to generate experimental microcosms colon..., ,