New Weapon Found in War on Mosquitoes

In a climate-controlled vault deep in the bowels of Vanderbilt University Center for Molecular Neuroscience, live thousands of Anopheles mosquitoes, also known as the malaria mosquito.

Anopheles are responsible for over a million malaria deaths globally each year.

Scientists all over the world have spent many years and millions of research dollars trying to find scientific solutions to the malaria scourge.

Dr. Patrick Jones and his colleagues believe they might just have found one, and much more.

With a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Jones was studying the insect’s olfactory system, used by the mosquito to smell and find the human blood on which it feeds.

His experiments required the removal and crushing of the mosquitoes‘ antennae which house the olfactory system.

Jones then bombarded the crushed antennae with more than 117,000 different chemical compounds to see if any would effect the insect’s olfactory receptor cells.

One of them did.

[Dr. Patrick Jones, Post Doctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University]:

„When we started out we sought to develop a new mosquito-specific insect repellent but along the way what we think we’ve discovered is a compound that has the potential to repel virtually all insects. So this would be the nuisance insects in your back yard, disease vectors as well as agricultural pests.“

The compound, called VUAA1, works on flies, moths and ants as well as it does on the Anopheles mosquito.

Mosquitoes and other insects rely on individual receptors to detect specific smells that trigger a response in the brain.

VUAA1 throws that system into chaos by confusing the insect with overwhelming and contradictory signals.

[Dr. Patrick Jones, Post Doctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University]:

„So essentially, what this compound does is it activates every single smell receptor that a mosquito has, thus doing two things. It’ll short-circuit their olfactory system but at the same time it’ll also mask their ability to smell anything else.“

And if the mosquito can’t smell human blood, it won’t see humans as a source of food.

The same principal applies to other insects such as crop-eating locusts or flies that are attracted to human sweat.

The scientists believe their discovery has great potential.

[Dr. Patrick Jones, Post Doctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University]:

„It was an accident. It was fantastic, it was something we didn’t expect but we’re so happy we found it and hopefully some day, this can be used to reduce malaria transmission in Africa which is our ultimate goal.”

Vanderbilt University has filed for a patent on the newly discovered compound and, while commercial development will take millions of dollars and years of further testing, a truly effective repellent for malaria, dengue fever and other mosquito-borne diseases is now a real possibility.

Foto: NTD