Mosquito aging modulates the heart rate and the proportional directionality of heart contractions.

Mosquito aging impacts a myriad of physiological processes, including digestion, flight, mating, reproductive success, and immunity. In the present study, we conducted intravital video imaging in 1, 3, 5, 10, 15 and 20-day-old Anopheles gambiae female adults to assess whether aging impacts mosquito heart physiology. We found that the heart contraction rate increases over the first 15days of adulthood and then decreases. These changes occur for both contraction directions, although aging results in a relative change in the anterograde versus retrograde contraction rates. That is, whereas for the first 5days of life the anterograde and retrograde contraction rates are similar, from day 10 to day 20 the retrograde contraction rate is higher than the anterograde contraction rate. Aging also biases the proportional directionality of heart contractions, from approximately two thirds of the time being spent contracting in the anterograde direction and two thirds of the contractions propagating anterograde during the first 5days of life to an approximately even split between anterograde and retrograde when the mosquitoes have reached 10 to 20days of age. Transcriptional analyses of crustacean cardioactive peptide (CCAP), FMRFamide, calcium-calmodulin dependent kinase II (CaMKII), pygopus, manganese-iron superoxide dismutase (MnSOD1) and vinculin by quantitative RT-PCR revealed age-associated changes in gene expression, with MnSOD1 and vinculin expression showing a declining trend with age. RNAi-based knockdown of MnSOD1 or vinculin resulted in heart physiology that trended toward the aging phenotype for every parameter that was measured, suggesting that these two genes are involved in cardiac aging.