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Mosquitos sniff out humans with super-smelling neurons
The neurons in some mosquitoes’ antennae and brains have exceptionally elaborate gear for smelling nearby humans — even humans who use chemicals in an effort to hide their scents 1 .
In most animals, each olfactory neuron in the nose or antennae has a single type of receptor on its surface that binds to a small set of odour-producing chemicals. And all olfactory neurons that have that type of receptor feed information into their own area of the brain, known as a glomerulus.
But yellow fever mosquitoes ( Aedes aegypti ) have many more types of olfactory receptor on their antennae than glomeruli in their brains. To find out why, Margaret Herre at the Rockefeller University in New York City and her colleagues traced the connections between neurons in Ae . aegypti mosquitoes. They found that many olfactory neurons had a variety of surface receptors, allowing them to detect a range of chemical odorants, particularly those given off by humans.
The researchers say that the system probably evolved to give the insects fallback ways of finding us, which could help to explain why effective mosquito repellents are so hard to develop. .
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