The Neuroscience Behind Why Mosquitoes Always Find You

Do we need mosquitos? Are these bloodsuckers and transmitters of diseases important for biodiversity? If not eradicate or genetically modify! High time for humans to sting back! 😄

Earlier this month, I blogged here about new research how mosquitos hone in on particular odors of humans. 

It appears, we have now a very good understanding why humans are desired by mosquitos and how they find us. So let's finally do something effective about this disease spreading pest!

"... "The olfactory system is a lot more adaptable, a lot more variable than we thought" ...

And they found that, contrary to prior assumptions and their own expectations, OR and IR receptors are frequently coexpressed in the same neurons. Not just that, some groupings of particular receptors were frequently found together, though ... “There may be some logic in this really different olfactory system,” ...

The complexity continues to the brain, the team found. “In mosquitoes, we saw a lot of overlap in the brain,” ... with individual antennal lobe glomeruli receiving olfactory information from multiple types of receptors. This overlap in the glomeruli, as well as the coexpression of receptors, may be why mosquitoes in previous experiments were able to keep smelling humans, even when one receptor type was missing or non-functional. ..."

From the abstract:

"... Mosquitoes are intensely attracted to body odor and carbon dioxide, which they detect using ionotropic chemosensory receptors encoded by three large multi-gene families. Genetic mutations that disrupt the olfactory system have modest effects on human attraction, suggesting redundancy in odor coding. The canonical view is that olfactory sensory neurons each express a single chemosensory receptor that defines its ligand selectivity. We discovered that Ae. aegypti uses a different organizational principle, with many neurons co-expressing multiple chemosensory receptor genes. In vivo electrophysiology demonstrates that the broad ligand-sensitivity of mosquito olfactory neurons depends on this non-canonical co-expression. The redundancy afforded by an olfactory system in which neurons co-express multiple chemosensory receptors may increase the robustness of the mosquito olfactory system and explain our long-standing inability to disrupt the detection of humans by mosquitoes."

The Neuroscience Behind Why Mosquitoes Always Find You | The Scientist Magazine® Neurons in mosquito antennae can express more than one olfactory receptor at a time, a redundancy that likely ensures they don’t lose a potential host’s scent.

Non-canonical odor coding in the mosquito (open access)