How Mosquitoes Smell Humans, Between a variety of mosquito-borne diseases, most notably malaria, nearly one million deaths each year can be traced back to simple mosquito bites.

Unlocking the Mystery How Mosquitoes Smell Humans

Therefore, curbing the deadly attraction between mosquitoes and humans is a significant public health priority. Unfortunately, attempts to do so by interfering with how mosquitoes pick up our scent have proven fruitless thus far. How Mosquitoes Smell Humans, Now, an enlightening new scientific study explains why the mosquito’s sense of smell is so difficult to disrupt. The research, published recently in the journal Cell, reveals an exquisitely complex olfactory system that empowers Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to specialize in hunting humans and spread viruses such as dengue, Zika, chikungunya, and yellow fever. Longstanding assumptions about how mosquitoes sense and interpret odors are upended by data presented in the paper.

“At first glance, mosquito olfaction makes no sense. How Mosquitoes Smell Humans, The way the mosquito organizes its sensation of smell is completely unexpected,” says Leslie Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor at The Rockefeller University and Chief Scientific Officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. “But for the mosquito it makes perfect sense. Every neuron that interprets smell is redundant in such a way that the olfactory system is essentially unbreakable. This may explain why we haven’t found a way to break mosquitoes’ attraction to humans.”

Source: This news is originally published by scitechdaily

By Web Team

Technology Times Web team handles all matters relevant to website posting and management.