When? mosquitoes woman looking for someone to bite her, they smell a unique cocktail of body odors that we release into the air. These odors then stimulate receptors on the mosquitoes’ antennae. Scientists have tried to eliminate these receptors to make humans undetectable to mosquitoes.
Again, Even after removing a set of odor-sensitive receptors from the mosquito genome, the mosquitoes still find a way to bite us.. Now, a group of researchers published in the journal Cell On August 18, he discovered that mosquitoes had developed unnecessary safety devices in their olfactory systems that ensured they could always smell our scents.
“Mosquitoes are breaking all our rules about how animals smell things.“, explained Margo Herre, a scientist at Rockefeller University and one of the paper’s main authors.
In most animals, one olfactory neuron is responsible for perceiving only one type of odor. “If you’re a human and you lose a single olfactory receptor, all the neurons expressing that receptor lose the ability to smell that odor,” says Leslie Vosshall, professor and lead author at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at Rockefeller University. article of the study. But he and his colleagues found that was not the case for mosquitoes.
“You have to work harder to kill mosquitoes because getting rid of a single receptor has no effect.” Vosshall points out. “Any future attempt to control mosquitoes with repellents or anything else must take into account how unbreakable their appeal to us is.”
“This project started out of nowhere when we were looking at how human scent is encoded in the mosquito brain,” says Meg Younger, a professor at Boston University and one of the paper’s lead authors.
a complex mechanism
They found that neurons stimulated by human odor 1-octen-3-ol are also stimulated by amines, another type of chemical mosquitoes use to search for humans. This is somewhat unusual because, according to all existing rules for how animals smell, neurons encode odor with narrow specificity, suggesting that 1-octen-3-ol neurons should not detect amines.
“Surprisingly, human sensing neurons via 1-octen-3-ol and amine receptors were not separate populations,” says Younger. This may allow all human-related scents activate the “human sensing part” of the mosquito brain, It acts as a security mechanism, even if some recipients are lost.
The team also used mononuclear RNA sequencing to see which receptors individual mosquito olfactory neurons expressed. According to Olivia Goldman, another lead author of the paper, “The result gave us a broad view of how common receptor co-expression is in mosquitoes.”
Vosshall believes other insects may have a similar mechanism.. Christopher Potter’s research group at Johns Hopkins University recently reported that fruit flies have similar receptor expression in their neurons. “This may be a general strategy for insects that relies heavily on their sense of smell,” says Vosshall.
In the future, Meg Younger’s group plans to explore the functional significance of co-expression of different types of olfactory receptors.
Reference work: https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)00927-8?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867422009278%3Fshowall% 3Dtrue
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