If you’ve ever sprayed yourself head to toe in bug repellent, yet still felt like a mosquito magnet, it will come as no shock to you that mosquitoes are very, very good at finding humans to bite. One key factor in this superpower is their keen sense of smell, or olfaction, which relies on the olfactory system.
“Mosquitoes are highly specialized,” says Meg Younger, a Boston University College of Arts & Sciences assistant professor of biology, who studies mosquito olfaction.
Younger is working to crack the code on how mosquitoes use their sense of smell to track us, in order to better understand how we can repel them more effectively. In a new paper published in Cell, Younger and her colleagues describe the unique and previously unknown way Aedes aegypti mosquitoes process smell at the biological level.
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According to the study findings, Aedes aegypti mosquitoes’ olfactory system is organized very differently, with multiple sensory receptors housed within one neuron, a process called gene coexpression. This uniquely specialized olfactory system could help explain why mosquitoes are so good at sniffing out humans to bite.
“This is shockingly weird,” says Younger, who initially thought her look into mosquito sensory neurons would prove it to be like every other olfactory system, like in flies and mice.
