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A team of Indo-American researchers has discovered a new repellent against mosquitoes from a soil bacterium, which is superior to the best chemical repellent currently available on the market.
When marketed, the personal care product can play a crucial role in reducing the risks of mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, chikunguniya and zika.
DEET (used since 1944 and widely marketed) and picaridine (used since 2005) are two of the most used mosquito repellents in the world.
Scientists have argued that the new repellent is as effective and sometimes even better than the two chemicals that dominate the mosquito repellent market.
Developed by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the National Malaria Research Institute in Delhi, the new product is a mixture of two metabolites of a soil bacterium that the Are commonly found in nature.
"The next steps are to examine the toxicity to determine if the repellent can be safely used on the skin. If it is safe, it will likely be used as an aerosol, lotion or cream, said Susan M Paskewitz, a Wisconsin professor and senior author of the study.
When researchers coated a piece of cloth with insect repellent and released the pests for food, nearly 90% of the mosquitoes did not land on them for food.
"The majority of them do not touch clothes at all. Maybe they do not like his taste or smell. We still do not know how they work, but our experience shows that chemicals deter mosquitoes, "said Mayur K Kajla, first author of the article and a scientist at NIMR. DH.
In their laboratory, they experimented with three species of mosquitoes – Aedes aegypti (which caused dengue fever) Anopheles gambiae and Culex pipiens. Whenever the repellent disrupted the food habit of mosquitoes.
"The repellent could also be important to India because there are 58 species of Anopheles mosquitoes in India and many of them are vectors of diseases," said Kajla, who conducted the research at the University of California. American university and is currently working at NIMR. a Ramlingaswami fellow.
Mosquito-borne diseases trigger a number of threats to public health in India. According to the latest national profile on health, there were nearly 1.58 lakh dengue cases (1.29 lakh in 2016); 8.42 cases of malaria (10.87 lakh) and more than 63 000 cases of chikungunya.
Scientists have examined compounds from a bacterium called Xenorhabdus budapestensis, inspired studies that have shown that bacteria belonging to the genus Xenorhabdus exert various antibiotic, antifungal and insecticidal bio-activities in their secondary metabolites. .
They then isolated deterrent compounds for feeding mosquitoes from bacterial cultures and compared the deterrent activities of compounds produced by Xbu to those produced by the two synthetic repellents, DEET and picaridine.
The results were published in the journal Progress of science.
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