Editorial on the Research Topic Biological drivers of vector-pathogen interactions-vol II Our quest as researchers to understand and push back on the spread of vector-borne diseases has improved significantly over the last few years. This is largely due to the contributions of 'omics' technologies which speed up research carried out and analysed on the vector, pathogen and the vector microbiome simultaneously. The faster we can work with the data obtained, the closer we are to our goals of attaining methods to protect animals and humans against the diseases and hopefully eradicate them in the not-sodistant future. To this end the contributions within this Research Topic are exactly what we need. Pathogen/vector surveillance Constant surveillance studies are important, so as to be prepared for possible outbreaks and to control vector-borne diseases. Liu et al., collected 140,000 mosquitoes, belonging to various species from 2018-2020 in both rural and urban habitats. The authors show that one of the fully sequenced virus isolates they obtained from their collection in Zheigang, China was evolutionary related to the isolate originating from Cambodia, a distance of 3,500km. Using genomic data, the authors reported that the Dengue virus, which infected the local Aedes albopictus mosquitoes, led to the local Dengue Fever virus outbreak in this region in 2019 and displays a correlation with imported Dengue Fever cases from Cambodia at this time. Overall, the importance of such studies cannot be stressed enough. Sampling, whole genome sequencing, phylogenetic analysis, and the analysis of medical records are needed to build a complete story for local and national vector-borne disease surveillance. Frontiers in Cellular and Infection Microbiology frontiersin.org 01