A researcher discovers how mosquitoes integrate vision and smell to track victims: Animals: Nature World News

July 22, 2019 14:54 EDT

Mosquitoes are smarter than you think.

Scientists have discovered that mosquitoes are changing their hunting habits in response to host signals. For example, in Africa, mosquitoes now recognize the time when people leave mosquito nets in the morning and start hunting more often during the day than at night.

Clément Vinauger, a Virginia Tech researcher, has discovered a new neurobiology badociated with mosquito vision and the sense of smell that explains Aedes aegypti the mosquitoes follow their victims.

Aedes aegypti mosquitoes transmit dengue, chikungunya, Zika fever, Mayaro virus and yellow fever virus.

"Mosquitoes affect millions of people every year, I'm trying to understand how mosquitoes navigate in space and time." Analyze how information about mosquito treatment is crucial to determining how to create mosquitoes. best baits and traps to fight mosquitoes, "said Vinauger. Assistant Professor in the Department of Biochemistry at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences of Virginia Tech.

While scientists understand a lot about the smell of the mosquito and how it targets CO2 exhalations to find their hosts, very little is known about how the mosquito uses vision.

Vinauger discovered that it is the interaction between the olfactory and visual treatment centers of the mosquito brain that allows these insects to target with as much precision their victims.

These results were recently published in the journal Current biology.

When mosquitoes encounter CO2, they are attracted to dark, visual objects, such as their hosts. This new study shows that CO2 affects neuron responses in visual centers of mosquitoes, to help them track visual objects with greater accuracy.

Vinauger and his research team were able to determine this by equipping the mosquitoes with tiny 3D printed helmets, attaching them in an LED flight simulator and exposing the mosquitoes to CO2 sparks.

"We monitored mosquito responses to visual and olfactory cues by monitoring the frequency of wing beats, acceleration, and cornering behavior," said Vinauger.

Using calcium imaging experiments in the brain of mosquitoes, the research team discovered that CO2 modulated neural responses of mosquitoes to discrete visual stimuli.

In previous research, Vinauger also used imaging and neural recordings to show how the responses of olfactory centers were modulated by previous experience of mosquitoes, as a result of lessons learned from nudity and ## 147 ## 39, other attempts to eliminate them from our smell.

"The overall strategy for managing mosquito-borne diseases is controlling vector populations, largely through the application of insecticides, but mosquito-borne diseases are resurging. mainly because of the increasing resistance of populations to insecticides, in this context my research objectives to fill the main gaps in our knowledge of the mechanisms that allow mosquitoes to be vectors of such effective diseases and, more 'Identify and characterize the factors that modulate their host search behavior,' said Vinauger, an affiliate faculty member of the Fralin Life Sciences Institute and BIOTRANS program.

Vinauger's laboratory is dedicated to the study of modulations of mosquito-host interactions induced by pathogens and circadians, while exploiting interdisciplinary tools of biochemistry, neuroscience, engineering and the 39, chemical ecology, to study its impact on the behavior of genes, neurons and insects.