The inaugural Prof. Takatoshi Ito Memorial Lecture was held on January 23, 2026.
This lecture marked the launch of a new memorial lecture series established in honor of the late Prof. Takatoshi Ito, whose longstanding dedication and generous support played an indispensable role in the growth of Friends of UTokyo, Inc. (FUTI). The series reflects FUTI’s commitment to its mission of nurturing the next generation of leaders. (For more information, please see Launch of “The Prof. Ito Memorial Lecture Series: Featuring Early-Stage Professionals”.)
The first speaker in this commemorative series was Dr. Yuki Haba, recipient of the 2015 FUTI Scholarship and currently a member of FUTI’s Advisory Committee. Dr. Haba is an evolutionary biologist and is conducting research at the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute at Columbia University.
The lecture opened with welcoming remarks by Dr. Iwao Ojima, Chair of the FUTI Board of Directors, who introduced FUTI’s founding mission and described the organization’s history and activities. He also paid tribute to Prof. Ito’s many contributions, particularly his leadership in establishing the FUTI Travel Award and his unwavering commitment to supporting young scholars and researchers. Dr. Ojima concluded by expressing the organization’s deep gratitude and remembrance of Prof. Ito.
Dr. Haba then delivered a lecture entitled:
“Human-Biting Urban Mosquitoes Originated in Ancient Egypt: International Research Overturns a Long-Held Evolutionary Theory and Marks an Important Step Toward Eliminating Mosquito-Borne Infectious Diseases.”
The presentation was based on a research paper published in Science in October 2025 and explained, in an accessible manner, the background of the study, its methodology, and the significance of its findings. The lecture generated considerable interest among participants and was followed by a lively question-and-answer session.
Lecture Summary
Urbanization is rapidly reshaping landscapes around the world, posing the question of whether and how quickly animals and plants can adapt. Cx. pipiens form molestus, more commonly known as the London Underground Mosquito, has been held up as a benchmark for the potential speed and complexity of urban adaptation. This intraspecific lineage within Cx. pipiens s. s. is purported to have evolved human-biting and a suite of other human-adaptive behaviors in the subways and cellars of northern Europe within the past 200 years. It features prominently in textbooks as well as scholarly reviews of urban adaptation. Yet the hypothesis of in situ urban evolution has never been rigorously tested.
In addition to spawning an enigmatic human-biting form, Cx. pipiens s. s. is one of the most important vectors of mosquito-borne disease in temperate regions across the world. The ancestral form of Cx. pipiens is bird biting and serves as a major vector of West Nile Virus (WNV) within bird populations. Hybridization of this ancestral bird-biting form with human-biting molestus produces mosquitoes willing to bite both birds and humans and is hypothesized to have driven increasing spillover of WNV to humans in the US and southern Europe over the past two decades. While this hypothesis has spurred intense efforts to characterize gene flow between forms, the results have been variable and confusing, with no clear consensus on where and to what degree it occurs.
Dr. Haba’s group sequenced the whole genomes of ~350 contemporary and historical Cx. pipiens mosquitoes from 77 populations scattered across Europe, North Africa, and western Asia and used population genomic analysis to infer molestus’ evolutionary history. Studies of population structure, derived allele-sharing, phylogeny, and cross-coalescence show that molestus could not have evolved in urban belowground habitats over the last 200 years. Instead, it first adapted to human environments >1000 years ago in the Mediterranean basin, most likely in Ancient Egypt or another early agricultural society.
Genomic data sets also provide a major revision to our understanding of gene flow between bird- and mammal-biting forms. We found that genetic signatures researchers previously ascribed to between-form hybridization instead reflect ancestral variation within bird-biting populations. After correcting for this variation, we can see that true hybridization is less common than previously believed and is associated with human population density, a proxy for urbanization.
The work of Dr. Haba’s team debunks one of the most widely cited examples of rapid urban adaptation, an example that has captured the attention of scientists and lay people for 25 years. Rather than benchmarking the speed and complexity of urban evolution, this updated history highlights the role of early human society in priming taxa for colonization of modern urban environments. Our work also revises our fundamental understanding of gene flow in this important vector and opens the door to incisive investigation of the potential links between urbanization, hybridization, and arbovirus spillover to humans.
Reference
Haba, Y., et al. “Ancient origin of an urban underground mosquito.” Science (2025). https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ady4515
FUTI Staff