Comparison between uninfected mosquito (UIM) bites and CHIKV infected mosquito (CIM) bites.

<p>Uninfected and CHIKV infected <i>Ae. aegypti</i> ware allowed to feed upon mouse ears, and total RNA was extracted from biopsies at the indicated times. Real-time RT-PCR was performed to measure expression of the indicated cytokine mRNAs. RNA extracted from ears of mice not exposed to mosquitoes were considered as naïve and assigned an arbitrary value of 1.0, and changes in mosquito-induced cytokine gene expression are expressed as the ratio between mosquito-fed and naïve samples. GAPDH gene was used as a normalizing control. The asterisk denotes a statistically significant difference between the means of naïve and experimental groups (*-<i>P</i>≤0·05; **- <i>P</i>≤0·001). <i>N</i> = 3 per group.