Unlike most animals, mosquitoes can pick up on odours via several different pathways, study suggests
“We found that there’s a real difference in the way mosquitoes encode the odours that they encounter compared to what we’ve learned from other animals,” said Meg Younger, an assistant professor of biology at Boston University and one of the lead authors of the study.
The team then examined odour receptors in the antennae of mosquitoes, which bind to chemicals floating around in the environment and signal to the brain via neurons. This means losing one or more receptors does not affect the ability of mosquitoes to pick up on human smells. This backup system could have evolved as a survival mechanism, the researchers say.is specialised to bite humans, and it is believed that they evolved to do that because humans are always close to fresh water and mosquitoes lay their eggs in fresh water. We are basically the perfect meal, so the drive to find humans is extremely strong,” said Younger.
“One major strategy for controlling mosquitoes is to attract them to traps to remove them from the biting population. If we could use this knowledge to understand how human odour is represented in the mosquito antennae and brain, we could develop blends that are more attractive to mosquitoes than we are. We could also develop repellants that target those receptors and neurons that detect human odour,” said Younger.
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