# POPULATION GENOMICS OF ADAPTATION

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF OREGON · 2020 · $295,000

## Abstract

Project Summary
Malaria that results from Plasmodium falciparum is among the most globally
devastating human diseases. The principle vector of malaria, mosquitoes of the
Anopheles gambiae species complex, are thus central targets for controlling the
human health burden of Plasmodium. For nearly two decades, there have been
large-scale, coordinated efforts to diminish mosquito populations, generally
through spraying and insecticide treated bed nets. Indeed such control efforts
have now led to a nearly 50% decrease in the rates of malaria infection in many
parts of sub-Saharan Africa. At present, however, control efforts of A. gambiae
are being threatened by evolutionary responses within mosquitos: A. gambiae
populations have shown increases in insecticide resistance as well as behavioral
adaptations that allow mosquitos to avoid spraying all together. Thus adaptation
of mosquitos to the control efforts themselves is currently a risk to maintain the
gains made in the fight against malaria.
In this proposal we lay out an integrated population genomic approach for
systematically identifying regions of the A. gambiae genome that are evolving
adaptively in response to ongoing control efforts. Our approach centers upon
state-of-the-art supervised machine learning techniques that we have recently
introduced for finding the signatures of selective sweeps in genomes (Schrider
and Kern, 2016), coupled with the large-scale population genomic datasets
currently in production by the Ag1000G consortium.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 9957109
- **Project number:** 5R01GM117241-05
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
- **Principal Investigator:** ANDREW D KERN
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2020
- **Award amount:** $295,000
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2017-09-01 → 2022-07-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/9957109

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 9957109, POPULATION GENOMICS OF ADAPTATION (5R01GM117241-05). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/9957109. Licensed CC0.

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