Whether you opt for repellant, long sleeves or citronella coils, the dreaded mosquito drone is always back at you.
Now researchers say they have found the mechanism behind the insect’s ability to homicide on humans.
Humans release an aromatic cocktail of body odor, heat, and carbon dioxide, which varies from person to person and mosquitoes use to locate their next meal. While most animals have a specific set of neurons that detect each type of odor, mosquitoes can pick up odors through several different pathways, shows the study, which is published in the science journal Cell.
“We found that there is a real difference between how mosquitoes learn to smell from other animals compared to the odors they encounter,” said Meg Younger, assistant professor of biology at Boston University. study.
Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York were astonished when mosquitoes were able to bite people even after the entire family of human odor-sensing proteins had been removed from their genomes.
The team then examined odor receptors in the antennae of mosquitoes, which bind to chemicals floating in the environment and send signals to the brain via neurons.
“We assumed that mosquitoes would follow the central dogma of olfaction, that only one type of receptor is expressed in each neuron,” Younger said. “Instead, what we have observed is that different receptors may respond to different odors in the same neuron.”
This means that losing one or more of the receptors does not affect the mosquitoes’ ability to pick up on human odors. Researchers say that this backup system could have evolved as a survival mechanism.
“Mosquito” aedes aegypti Biting is typical for humans, and it is thought that they evolved to do so because humans are always close to fresh water and mosquitoes lay their eggs in fresh water. We are basically perfect food, so the desire to find humans is extremely strong,” Younger said.
Ultimately, researchers say, understanding how the mosquito brain processes human odor may be used to interfere with biting behavior and reduce the spread of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue and yellow fever. can go.
“A major strategy for controlling mosquitoes is to attract them to traps to remove them from biting populations. If we can use this knowledge to understand how mosquito antennae and brains represent human odor If done, we can develop mixtures that are more attractive to mosquitoes than we are. We can also develop repellents that target the receptors and neurons that detect human odor,” said Younger. Told.
Dr Olena Ryabinina from the Insect Neuro Lab at Durham University, who was not involved in the research, said: “We already knew that mosquitoes are hardwired to bite humans, but this research tells us that their friction The system is different and more complex than we thought. An intervention based on this new information could be very promising.”
Dr Marta Andrés Miguel of University College London, who was not involved, said: “This is a remarkable discovery not only from a fundamental biology perspective, but also from a disease-control perspective, as it opens new avenues for the evolution of controlling mosquitoes.” new tools, either to attract them to the trap, or to repel them and avoid human bites.”
(This story has not been edited by seemayo staff and is published from a rss feed)