Mosquito Habitat Expansion Under Environmental Stress: Exposome-Driven Molecular Mechanisms and Implications for Human Health

Mosquitoes are widely considered the deadliest animals on the planet, responsible for the transmission of pathogens causing malaria, dengue fever, Zika virus infection, West Nile fever, and lymphatic filariasis, collectively accounting for hundreds of thousands of deaths and millions of illnesses annually. The ecological and epidemiological consequences of mosquito-borne diseases are well characterized; however, a critical knowledge gap persists regarding the environmental and molecular mechanisms that enable mosquitoes to rapidly expand their geographic range in response to shifting exposome conditions. The first confirmed detection of mosquitoes in Iceland in 2025 marked a historic milestone: for the first time in recorded history, these insects are now present in every country on the planet. This extraordinary feat of colonization — achieved despite extreme environmental challenges including novel climatic regimes, altered precipitation patterns, urban heat islands, and mounting xenobiotic pressure — underscores an adaptive capacity driven by complex gene–environment interactions that current public health frameworks do not fully account for. Understanding how environmental exposures enable mosquitoes to establish themselves in previously inhospitable environments is not merely an academic question; it is a pressing public health imperative with direct implications for human disease burden, global disease surveillance, vector control policy, and the environmental health of newly affected human populations.

This Research Topic invites contributions that advance our understanding of how components of the external exposome — encompassing climate, chemical pollutants, pesticides, microplastics, and land-use change — interact with vector molecular biology to drive mosquito habitat expansion and, ultimately, reshape the geographic distribution of human infectious disease risk. Key molecular axes of interest include the mosquito microbiome, epigenetic regulation, and non-canonical nucleic acid structures, each representing a mechanistic bridge between environmental exposure and human health outcome, as well as a potential target for evidence-based vector control strategies.

This collection sits at the intersection of environmental health, the exposome, vector biology, and molecular epidemiology, aligning closely with the mission of the Environmental Health and Exposome section of Frontiers in Public Health. By keeping the human-health endpoint central — from exposure to molecular mechanism to disease burden and control — the collection contributes directly to the section's priority areas and to SDGs 3 (Good Health and Well-being) and 13 (Climate Action). We welcome original research articles, systematic and narrative reviews, methods papers, and perspective pieces addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:
• Environmental exposome determinants of mosquito range expansion and their consequences for human infectious disease burden
• Characterization of mosquito gut and reproductive microbiomes across geographic, climatic, and chemical exposure gradients, with attention to changes in vector competence for human pathogens
• Epigenomic profiling of mosquito populations exposed to environmental stressors in newly colonized or rapidly changing habitats
• The role of non-B DNA structural motifs and non-coding RNAs in stress-responsive gene regulation as potential targets for vector control
• Molecular mechanisms of xenobiotic and insecticide resistance across all life stages, including eggs, in the context of environmental pollutant exposure
• The interplay between the external exposome — pollutants, pesticides, microplastics, and climate-related stressors — and mosquito molecular biology
• Public health and environmental health implications of vector range expansion: disease burden modelling, surveillance systems, and evidence-based control strategies for newly affected human populations

By integrating perspectives from environmental toxicology, exposure science, entomology, computational biology, microbiology, and public health, this collection aims to produce a comprehensive mechanistic account of how the environmental exposome drives mosquito adaptation — and how that adaptation, in turn, drives human disease risk in a rapidly changing world. In doing so, it responds directly to the Environmental Health and Exposome section's call to identify mechanisms of action of environmental exposures on human health and to explore novel environmental health hazards and dimensions of the exposome.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• ... View all formats

Articles that are accepted for publication by our external editors following rigorous peer review incur a publishing fee charged to Authors, institutions, or funders.

Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Community Case Study
• Curriculum, Instruction, and Pedagogy
• Data Report
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Policy Brief
• Review
• Study Protocol
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Mosquito habitat expansion, Epigenetics and transgenerational plasticity, Mosquito microbiome, Non-canonical DNA structures, Long non-coding RNAs, Xenobiotic resistance, Insecticide resistance, Climate change adaptation, Environmental exposome, Vector-borne disease burden, Human environmental health

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.