Yuki’s review on the origin of the enigmatic London Underground Mosquito (and more broadly on genetic and ecological variation within Culex pipiens) published in Current Biology! Check out the paper and his twitter thread.

Huge welcome to three new lab members: Vitor Dos Anjos, Tim Schwanitz, and Sakina Isadibir!

Very sad to say goodbye to first McBride lab grad student Zhilei Zhao and research tech Azwad Iqbal who are both moving on to positions at Cornell. Congratulations Dr. Zhao and future Dr. Iqbal!

We, the members of the McBride Lab, are outraged by the continual discrimination, harassment, and violence against Black and Brown people, including the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and too many others. We stand with our colleagues and millions of people around the world in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

While these atrocities are not novel or unique, we are speaking out now to publicly affirm our support for our Black and Brown colleagues and to acknowledge that our academic community is not immune to the pernicious effects of racism. As a lab, we are discussing strategies to actively combat racism and other forms of hate-based discrimination in our scientific communities and everyday lives. We will be providing more information on this website over the next several weeks and months about actions we plan to take in our community.

Noah’s preprint on the ecological and genomic drivers of mosquito preference for humans within Africa was just written up in Science. Check it out here!

(Unfortunately, the article does not highlight the important role played by various collaborators, including several groups that helped brainstorm and coordinate field work as well as Verily Life Sciences that conducted all the genome sequencing.)