Jordy van der Beek

As a biology student at Leiden University, I had the opportunity to do my bachelor internship at Naturalis. During this internship I looked at the mosquito fauna of the Dutch Caribbean Islands, which hadn’t been thoroughly studied for over 70 years.  After that, I got hooked on mosquito biodiversity and continued research on the taxonomy and ecology of Dutch Caribbean, as well as continental Dutch, mosquitoes.

Currently I’m collaborating with the Dutch Food and Safety Authority (NVWA) in a project where we hope to sequence the full mitochondrial genomes of all Dutch mosquito species, which means that we read a substantial part of the genetic code of the mosquitoes DNA. We hope to identify small pieces of DNA that can reliably distinguish mosquito species. In the future this will enable us to locate the breeding habitats of potentially harmful mosquito species, not only by searching for their aquatic larval stage, but also by scanning a small sample of water for small pieces of DNA. This can be particularly useful when all mosquitoes have already hatched or when the probability of encountering mosquito larvae is low.

Keywords

Mosquitoes, biodiversity, ecology, taxonomy, Dutch Caribbean Islands