PUBLICATION HIGHLIGHT
How mosquitoes find you!
This publication highlight is part of the SBGrid/Meharry Medical College Communities Project, focused on science education and demonstrating how structural biology and preclinical science connect to medicine.
It’s summertime, and those annoying mosquitoes are out. In some places, mosquitoes can pose a significant risk to public health. It is well known that mosquitoes can carry and transmit diseases to their human food sources. West Nile virus, malaria, and yellow fever can all be spread by mosquitoes in human populations. Thus, understanding the mosquito-human relationship on a molecular level is essential to maintain public health. But how are mosquitoes able to find you? Mosquitoes sense and pursue humans using their olfactory system: they track humans using scent. In a recent Science article, SBGrid member Josefina del Mármol determined the structure and molecular mechanism for the machinery mosquitoes use to target humans.
Using electron microscopy, Dr. del Mármol and colleagues determined the structure of the protein olfactory receptor used in the mosquito nervous system. This structure and further experiments showed an interesting composition of the membrane receptor. The receptor was heteromeric, meaning that it consisted of two different subunits at a unique 3:1 ratio. This novel observation fuels new insights into how scent molecules from humans bind to mosquito receptors and how to disrupt this interaction. Disrupting this interaction could slow human mosquito interactions and thus the spread of disease.
Read more about this olfactory receptor in Science.
By Vida Robertson, Fisk University
Vida Storm Robertson is a Masters Student in Chemistry at Fisk University working in both solid-state and solution based structural determination techniques. He will begin his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics at Caltech this summer.
