While in other animals each odor type needs its own receptor, mosquito receptors can recognize many types.
The yellow fever mosquito Temples of the Egyptians is known as a disease vector that can infect people with malaria, yellow fever or dengue fever. Researchers at Rockefeller University in New York have observed that Mosquitoes find people themselves thenwhen looking at entire groups of proteins removed from their genetic material, which are responsible for recognizing human odors. As describe in the journal Cellthe mosquitoes’ sense of smell is apparently more complex than previously thought.
Mosquitoes follow no dogma
“What we found is that there is a real difference how mosquitoes encode smellscompared to what we know from other animals,” says Meg Younger, one of the authors of the study, to the Guardian. While other animals have their own receptors for different types of odors, mosquito receptors have the ability to identify different types of odors.
“We thought that mosquitoes follow the central dogma of olfaction, which is that only one type of receptor is expressed in a neuron. Instead, they can different receptors to different odors in the same neuron respond,” says Younger. So if they lose one or more receptor types, it doesn’t affect mosquitoes’ ability to smell.
Irresistible Traps
What sounds like a hopeless fate for people can also be an opportunity. With a better understanding of the yellow fever mosquito’s sense of smell, the researchers expect, for example, develop better traps to be able to For example, these might give off a smell to mosquitoes that is even more enticing than that of real people. Incidentally, in the course of their development, mosquitoes have specialized in humans because they always seem to live where there is enough water are. This is where the mosquitoes can lay their eggs.
