Title: Non-canonical olfaction in mosquitoes
Abstract:
Mosquitoes rely heavily on human-derived chemosensory cues as they search for a blood meal. Understanding how mosquitoes detect and encode human odor would provide a major inroad to prevent mosquito biting behavior and the transmission of diseases that claim more than half a million lives each year. The study of mosquito olfaction also provides an opportunity to address fundamental questions about chemosensory neuroscience in an organism whose behavior is driven strongly by their sense of smell. We discovered that the olfactory system of Aedes aegypti mosquitoes has a radically different organization from the canonical “one-receptor-to-one-neuron” organization identified in model species, with widespread chemosensory receptor co-expression within individual olfactory sensory neurons. This dramatic difference in sensory organization has wide-ranging implications for olfactory physiology in general and specifically the integration of human odor cues that support robust human host-seeking.