Illusion of influence? Public participation in the preparation of climate policies in Finland.

The African malaria mosquito is among the most efficient vectors of parasites and remains a major public-health challenge in sub-Saharan Africa. Transmission occurs exclusively through the blood-feeding of adult females, which digest blood to obtain nutrients required for oocyte development and egg production. This link between blood-feeding and reproduction makes female feeding behavior a critical determinant of both the vectorial capacity and mosquito population dynamics. Since stable germline transformation of mosquitoes was first demonstrated in the early 2000s (; ), transgenic strains have become important tools for mosquito research. They now underpin a wide range of studies in mosquito biology, from malaria transmission biology () to olfaction and sensory behavior (; ; ; ) and insecticide resistance (). Transgenic approaches are also integral to the development of genetic control strategies, including gene drives designed for population suppression and replacement (; ; ; ; ; ; ). These advances depend not only on the ability to introduce and stably integrate transgenes into the mosquito genome but also on reliably identifying transformed individuals. In practice, this is achieved through fluorescent reporters driven by 5′ and 3′ regulatory sequences (hereafter, 5′ regulatory sequences are referred to as promoters for simplicity) that ensure strong and easily detectable expression, most often during larval stages when screening is performed under a fluorescent microscope. An ideal reporter is bright throughout development, spectrally distinct from other markers (eg eGFP vs DsRed), and compatible with multiple constructs, for instance through tissue-specific expression patterns (eg eye- vs muscle-specific). Differences in brightness between homozygotes and heterozygotes can sometimes aid husbandry and genetics, though these are highly dependent on the genome integration site and are more reliably distinguished using automated optical sorters (eg COPAS) than by eye (). Above all, reporters should be phenotypically neutral, imposing no measurable fitness costs that might confound experiments or limit their application. Several promoters have been used to drive fluorescent marker expression in , including the synthetic promoter, which drives strong eye- and neuron-specific fluorescence () and the heterologous promoter from , which provides broad somatic expression (). Endogenous promoters have also been developed, including the promoter () and the promoter (), which drive multitissue expression. Viral regulatory elements like have also been used to drive ubiquitous expression (; ). The promoter, derived from the immediate early gene 2 () of the multicapsid nucleopolyhedrovirus () (), has proven highly effective in diverse insect systems. The promoter works well in lepidopteran and dipteran cell line transfections (; ) and in transgenic strains of several insect species, including in (; ), (; ), (; ), () () (), (; ; ; ), (; ), and (). However, its performance in has not been systematically examined.