Hundreds of thousands of people die annually from malaria; a protozoan of the genus Plasmodium is responsible for this mortality. The Plasmodium parasite undergoes several life stages within the mosquito vector, the transition between which require passage across the lumen of the mosquito midgut. It has been observed that in about 15% of parasites that develop ookinetes in the mosquito abdomen, sporozoites never develop in the salivary glands, indicating that passage across the midgut lumen is a significant barrier in parasite development (Gamage-Mendis et al., 1993). We aim to investigate a possible correlation between passage through the midgut lumen and drug-resistance trends in Plasmodium falciparum parasites. This study contains a total of 1024 Anopheles mosquitoes: 187 Anopheles gambiae and 837 Anopheles funestus samples collected in high malaria transmission areas of Mozambique between March and June of 2016. Sanger sequencing will be used to determine the prevalence of known resistance alleles for anti-malarial drugs: chloroquine resistance transporter (pfcrt), multidrug resistance (pfmdr1) gene, dihydropteroate synthase (pfdhps) and dihydrofolate reductase (pfdhfr). We compare prevalence of resistance between abdomen and head/thorax in order to determine whether drug resistant parasites are disproportionately hindered during their passage through the midgut lumen. A statistically significant difference between resistance alleles in the two studied body sections supports the efficacy of new anti-malarial gene surveillance strategies in areas of high malaria transmission.

The majority of the public is not aware that common objects in their backyard can be mosquito breeding sites, thus leading to an increase in mosquitoes and mosquito-borne diseases affecting humans and animals during the peak seasons. An engaging app that instructs people of all ages how to identify, prevent, and eliminate breeding sites may be of use in increasing positive behavioral changes in people, and therefore reducing available breeding sites for mosquitoes. The Embodied Games Lab in Psychology at Arizona State University created an educational game phone app using machine learning to teach students how to identify and eliminate mosquito breeding sites. Skeeter Breeder is an interactive, educational game that teaches participants about potential mosquito breeding sites and how to eliminate them from the immediate environment as documented by smartphone imagery. Currently, there is no educational game phone app that uses machine learning to teach this topic. This Thesis describes a pilot study focused on educating about common mosquito breeding sites and increasing the knowledge of 5th graders on the topic through an agentic (by taking their own pictures), engaging (game-like platform with rewards), and interactive (receiving immediate feedback on pictures) game developed from scratch at ASU.