Fighting malaria by engineering flies to smell like mosquitos

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Mosquitos are still a leading cause of the spread of malaria and other diseases in many parts of the world. While we know that mosquitos find humans through smell, the details of their olfactory abilities hadn't been worked out. A new study in Nature describes how researchers isolated the olfactory genes of mosquitos and expressed them in fruit flies to see how each responds to certain smells. They found that mosquitos are attracted to certain chemicals in human breath and sweat, even in small amounts—knowledge they could use to build better repellents and traps.

The type of mosquito tested, A. gambiae, is the biggest spreader of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa. The fact that mosquitos detect humans through smell is well-known, but the molecular basis of their ability to sniff us out is not, even though the mosquito genome was sequenced several years ago.

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