PhD student

j.thailayil07@imperial.ac.uk

My goal is to identify which male factors trigger the behavioural and physiological responses observed in females after mating.
These factors include sperm and the mating plug, both of which are transferred to the female’s reproductive tract during copulation.
To this end I take advantage of males that have been incapacitated in testes formation (and therefore lacking sperm cells) to assess the response to mating of females that have only received the mating plug, focusing on whether these females are still able to oviposit and/or become refractory to a second mating attempt.
As part of a collaboration with the IRSS, Burkina Faso, I’m also studying the transcriptional female response to males in collected mosquitoes caught from natural swarms using quantitative RT-PCR techniques.
The aim of this project is to assess whether field mosquitoes exhibit a similar transcriptional response to mating to the response found in laboratory-bred mosquitoes (Rogers et al., PNAS 2008).