Altering the "flavor" of humans could help fight malaria

I personally hate mosquito bites as much as anyone else does. They make you extremely itchy and they puff up into ugly hives if you scratch them too much. Along with the annoying side effects of the bites, they also have the ability to transfer diseases. Malaria has more recently become a threat that people use to get someone to wear bug spray, to avoid mosquito season, and to avoid going outside after a certain time or weather condition. Malaria is an infectious disease of humans and animals that is transmitted by the bite of the female Anopheles gambiae mosquito. Despite the decades of effort put to eradicate and control mosquitoes, there is still an estimation of millions of people that are infected every year. Malaria is seen as a terrifying disease because there is not a vaccine for it. Treatment can be used if the disease is caught early enough, but it is expensive and difficult to transport to the areas where it is needed most. A large amount of effort has been put towards eliminating the stages of parasite transmission or to limit the size of the mosquito population, but not much is known about the A.gambiae mosquito. Most insect research about the olfactory systems is based off of what is learned from Drosophilia melanogaster.

 According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, a study has been done to have a better understanding of how female A. gambiae mosquitoes receive and process olfactory information from their sensory regions by seeing where the olfactory neurons from those regions go to in the brain. The researchers GRP (green fluorescent protein) as a tag to make certain neurons glow green. Those neurons that glowed green were the ones that receive the complex odors through the odorant receptors (OR). The OR is what is used to distinguish humans from other animals. The ORs are located in the antennae and maxillary palps on the mosquito, and the stimulation of the neurons showed a glowing green path to the antennal lobes of the brain. The surprising result was that the other sensory receptor, the labella, showed that the OR neurons went to the subesophageal zone, which is associated with the sense of smell in other flies and insects. Their findings suggest that the sense of smell and taste combine in the brain to create a “flavor” to the mosquitoes, which is what encourages them to bite us. The mosquitoes most likely pick up on the bodily odors and influence them on whether or not they want to bite us based on how appetizing we seem to them.

This research could be important for the future of malaria prevention and also mosquito control. The mosquito control could be done by finding a way to repel mosquitos by either deterring their long range signals by targeting the antennal neurons and make it less likely that they will come close to us or by making us less appetizing in the direct contact by targeting the labellar neurons. A repellant can be made to not smell as bas for humans as other repellants but could smell disgusting to the mosquitos to where they will not bite us. The drop in mosquito bites could potentially starve the females and decrease the mosquito population, while also decreasing the risk of malaria.

Article Source:

Olena Riabinina, Darya Task, Elizabeth Marr, Chun-Chieh Lin, Robert Alford, David A. O’Brochta, Christopher J. Potter. Organization of olfactory centres in the malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae. Nature Communications, 2016; 7: 13010 DOI: 10.1038/ncomms13010

Cite Page Found:

Johns Hopkins Medicine. “Altering the ‘flavor’ of humans could help fight malaria.” ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 10 October 2016. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/10/161010103830.htm>.