The Human Cocktail

Malaria is a disease affecting an estimated 200 million people, and is spread following a bite from a female Anopheles mosquito. In order to pinpoint a human target, mosquitoes use a variety of cues, including visual, humidity and olfactory. To better understand how mosquitoes receive and process this information, scientists used new genetic technology to make specific, odour-related neurons glow with a green fluorescence. Expecting to see the maxillary palps and antennae in green, they were quite surprised to see the labella – previously known only to be associated with taste – also glowed brightly (seen far right between the paler fuzzy palps). This result suggests that mosquitoes use taste, as well as smell when identifying their target. Finding a cocktail of preferred human smells and tastes could help researchers to pinpoint a substance that could ultimately prevent mosquitoes from taking the potentially deadly bite.

Written by Katie Panteli

Katie Panteli

Writer

Katie, a Warwick Biomed graduate, works for a science-publishing house in London with some of the world's most respected scientific minds. She's most interested in human biology, anything and everything that makes us tick.

• Image by Olena Riabinina and Courtney Akitake, Johns Hopkins Medicine
• The Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience, Center for Sensory Biology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA
• Image copyright held by original authors
• Research published in Nature Communications, October 2016