Speaker
Description
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 many individual olfactory sensory neurons. We also identify differences in the synaptic connectivity of sensory circuits that underly host detection, as compared to Drosophila melanogaster. These dramatic differences in sensory organization have wide-ranging implications for olfactory physiology in general and specifically the detection and integration of human odor cues that support robust human host-seeking.
