Cara, C. | bioRxiv Science

bioRxiv2025

Infection and host-feeding patterns of West Nile virus vectors varies by urban greenspace composition

Greenspaces are integral to the urban environment and affect climate resilience, yet the extent to which they affect mosquito and West Nile virus (WNV) host populations and behavior is not clear. To address this question, we collected mosquitoes along a transect spanning a range of urban development. Mosquitoes were tested for West Nile virus, and the host species that were fed on determined for blood-fed specimens. Bird counts and camera traps were used to assess avian and mammal species availability. Different components that contribute to WNV transmission intensity responded to different landcover variables. Abundance of Culex mosquitoes was most strongly tied to impervious surface, while prevalence of infection was associated with increasing amounts of turf grass. The amount of turf was itself correlated with a measure of avian community reservoir competence. Blood meal analysis suggested the majority of blood meals in the ornithophagic species Cx. pipiens and Cx. restuans came from American robins and northern cardinals, with the latter in particular being overutilized relative to their abundance in sites with higher WNV prevalence. This work furthers our understanding of how the design of urban greenspaces could benefit from consideration of vector-host-virus interactions.

ecology↗

bioRxiv2024

Multimodal investigation of the neurocognitive deficits underlying dyslexia in adulthood

Dyslexia is a neurobiological disorder characterised by reading difficulties, yet its underlying causes remain unclear. Neuroimaging and behavioural studies found anomalous responses in tasks requiring phonological processing, motion perception, and implicit learning, and showed gray and white matter abnormalities in several brain regions of dyslexics compared to controls, indicating that dyslexia is a heterogeneous condition and promoting a multifactorial approach. In order to evaluate whether the combination of behavioural and multimodal MRI can have greater sensitivity in identifying neurocognitive traits of dyslexia compared to monocomponential approaches, in 19 dyslexic and 19 control subjects we acquired behavioural cognitive assessments, multiple (phonological, visual motion, rhythmic) mismatch-response functional MRI tasks, structural diffusion-weighted and T1-weighted images. To examine between-group differences in the multimodal neurocognitive measures, we applied univariate and multivariate approaches. Results showed that dyslexics performed worse than controls in behavioural phonological tasks. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that individuals with dyslexia present reduced cerebellar responses to mismatching rhythmic stimuli, as well as structural disorganization in several white matter tracts and cortical regions previously implicated in dyslexia. Most importantly, in line with the view of dyslexia as a multifactorial phenomenon, a machine learning model trained with features from all three MRI modalities (functional, diffusion, and T1-weighted) discriminated between dyslexics and controls with greater accuracy than models including just one modality. The individual classification scores in the multimodal machine learning model correlated with behavioural reading accuracy. These results confirm that dyslexia should be approached as a composite condition characterised by multiple distinctive cognitive and brain features.

neuroscience↗