This is Scientific American 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher in D'Alga.

Got a minute?

It's well known that antibiotics can disrupt our gut bacteria.

But when mosquitoes snack on blood laced with antibiotics, the same can happen

to their microbiome. And that depletion of gut bacteria actually increases mosquito susceptibility

to the malaria parasite, meaning they may be more likely to host and then spread the disease causing protozoan.

That's according to a study in the journal Nature Communications.

Researchers fed mosquitoes the blood of children infected with the malaria parasite.

They added a penicillin streptomycin antibiotic cocktail to some samples

and a control solution to others. Turns out the mosquitoes that

sucked the blood doped with antibiotics were more likely to pick up the parasite and

those mosquitoes appeared to gain some benefit from the antibiotics too.

They live longer and had more offspring than the other mosquitoes in the tests.

So these commonly used antibiotics

made the insects a more powerful vector for malaria.

Some antibiotics of course do inhibit malaria transmission.

Doxycycline, for example, is sometimes taken as a malaria prophylactic.

Different antibiotics may have different impacts

which could translate it to an opposite effect

than what we demonstrated in the paper.

Study author George Christophides of Imperial College London.

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