For his work in revealing the hidden role of the microbiota in mosquito-borne disease, Yibin Zhu is the winner of the 2026 Noster NOSTER & Science Microbiome Prize. The work shows how microbiota from both the hosts and vectors can either promote or suppress virus transmission, depending on where they act in the transmission cycle. "Pathogens have taught us many of the foundational principles of infectious disease. Yet my work has convinced me that some of the most powerful regulators of transmission are neither pathogens nor hosts but the microbial communities that inhabit them," writes the author. Mosquito-borne diseases, such as malaria and dengue, arise through interactions among viruses, hosts, mosquitoes, and their environments. While microbiota are known to affect host immunity and physiology, research has traditionally focused on viruses or mosquito vectors, overlooking the microbes that connect them. Zhu's work aims to fill this gap by investigating how microbes influence multiple stages of the disease transmission cycle, including mosquito attraction to infected hosts and viral infection within mosquitoes.
Zhu and his colleagues' research has found that in infected hosts, viral infection altered the skin immune environment, suppressing the antimicrobial peptide RELMα and allowing acetophenone-producing skin bacteria to expand. Increased acetophenone production made infected hosts more attractive to mosquitoes, potentially enhancing virus transmission. In mosquitoes, a naturally occurring bacterial symbiont, Rosenbergiella_YN46, strongly reduced dengue and Zika virus infection in both disease-carrying Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus mosquito species. After blood feeding, the bacterium secreted an enzyme that acidified the mosquito gut, prematurely triggering irreversible changes in viral envelope proteins and rendering the viruses noninfectious. The symbiote microbe imposed no detectable fitness cost on mosquitoes and was more abundant in regions with lower dengue incidence. "Understanding this invisible hand of the microbiota may help us rethink how vector-borne diseases emerge and how they might finally be controlled," Zhu writes.
Finalists for the prize were Erik Bakkeren for his essay "Ecology of the gut microbiome: microbial competition can be harnessed to prevent and cure deadly diseases," and Taichi Suzuki for his essay "The missing thriftiness: host-microbial coevolution and its influence on human health."
