Mosquitoes have neuronal fail-safes to make sure they can always smell humans



Female mosquitoes detect a distinctive concoction of body scents humans release into the atmosphere while they are searching for a human to bite. The mosquitoes' antennae are then stimulated by these scents. To make people invisible to mosquitoes, researchers have attempted eliminating these receptors.

However, mosquitoes still manage to bite us despite having an entire family of odor-sensing receptors removed from their genome. Now, a team of researchers revealed that mosquitoes have evolved redundant fail-safes in their olfactory system that make sure they can always perceive our odors, according to a study published in the journal Cell on August 18.

According to main author of the study Margo Herre, a professor at Rockefeller University, "mosquitoes are defying all of our beloved norms of how animals sense things."

An olfactory neuron in the majority of animals can only recognize one kind of odor. Leslie Vosshall, a professor at Rockefeller University and senior author of the study, is affiliated with the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the senior author of the paper. "If you're a human and you lose a single odorant receptor, all of the neurons that express that receptor will lose the ability to smell that smell," she says. However, she and her coworkers discovered that this is not true of mosquitoes.

In order to eradicate mosquitoes, Vosshall contends that more effort must be put forward because eliminating a single receptor has no impact. Any future efforts to manage mosquitoes through the use of repellents or other methods must take into account how enduringly drawn to humans they are.

According to Meg Younger, a professor at Boston University and one of the paper's primary authors, "this project really started unexpectedly when we were looking at how human odor was encoded in the mosquito brain."

They discovered that amines, another class of chemical used by mosquitoes to search for humans, also excite neurons that are stimulated by the human odor 1-octen-3-ol. This is remarkable because all known theories about how animals perceive smell predict that 1-octen-3-ol neurons should not be able to identify amines because they encode odor with restricted specificity.

Unexpectedly, 1-octen-3-ol and amine receptor-detection neurons did not belong to discrete populations, claims Younger. This may serve as a fail-safe, allowing all human-related scents to trigger "the human-detecting component" of the mosquito brain even if some receptors are missing.

In order to determine whether additional receptors are expressed by specific mosquito olfactory neurons, the scientists also used single-nucleus RNA sequencing. According to Olivia Goldman, another main author of the study, "the discovery gave us a comprehensive insight of precisely how common co-expression of receptors is in mosquitoes."

According to Vosshall, other insects might have a comparable process. The Johns Hopkins University research team of Christopher Potter has discovered that fruit flies' neurons co-express identical receptors. According to Vosshall, "Insects that rely largely on their sense of smell may use this as a general strategy."

The goal of Meg Younger's team is to eventually determine the functional implications of the co-expression of various olfactory receptor types.

The American National Institute of Health contributed to the funding of this project.

Cell Press

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