So Science Daily says – and they don’t seem to be making this up – that scientists are stopping malaria by transplanting mosquitoes’ noses into frog eggs and fruit flies:
The mosquito’s “nose” is centered in its antennae, which are filled with nerve cells covered with special “odorant receptors” that react to different chemical compounds. The insect ORs are comparable to analogous receptors in the human nose and taste buds on the tongue.
“We’ve successfully expressed about 80 percent of the Anopheles mosquito’s odorant receptors in frog’s eggs and in the fruit fly antennae,” says Laurence Zwiebel, professor of biological sciences at Vanderbilt, whose lab performed the frog egg transplantation.
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In some cases, the researchers found that a single odorant triggers several receptors while in other cases receptors are specifically tuned to unique compounds. In particular, they found 27 Anopheles receptors that respond strongly to compounds in human sweat.
“We’re now screening for compounds that interact with these receptors. We call those that do BDOCs (behaviorally disruptive olfactory compounds),” Zwiebel says. “Compounds that excite some of these receptors could help lure mosquitoes into traps or repel them away from people while others that block receptor activity may help mask people.”