deadliest in the world Animals are picky eaters.Because they transmit viral diseases like Zika and chikungunya, as well as the parasite that causes malaria, mosquitoes love to suck blood egyptian temple It kills more than 700,000 people worldwide each year.
But in the lab of Omid Veiseh at Rice University, his team of bioengineers are working to get mosquitos to eat. Typically, researchers study mosquito feeding behavior by having them bite live animals — lab mice, or graduate students and postdocs with arms extended for science. This is not ideal, as laboratory animals can be expensive and impractical, and their use raises ethical concerns. Student arms are not well adapted to large tests.
Working with entomologists at Tulane University, Rice’s team hoped to develop a way to study mosquito behavior without experimenting with large numbers of animals. Their solution was quite different: real blood wrapped in inanimate hydrogel. “It feels like jelly,” Veiseh said. “Mosquitoes have to bite through the jelly to get to the blood.”
At least, in theory. Sometimes insects don’t bite. Sometimes they are unable to get their straw-like proboscis through. Finally, the team made enough tweaks — such as changing the gel firmness — that it happened. “This was a big moment of inspiration for us,” Veiseh said. “We saw this mosquito crawling on the gel, biting it and sucking blood.”
write in diary today Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology, The team describes their scalable platform for testing mosquito behavior. Their 3D printed hydrogel mimics skin and contains zigzag channels through which real blood can be pumped. To test the gels, the researchers pointed cameras at them and used computer vision algorithms to quickly analyze how many mosquitoes entered the buffet mouth-first. In a proof-of-concept experiment, they showed that mosquitoes refused to eat when the hydrogel smelled of repellent.
Medical entomologist Dawn Wesson from Tulane University, who co-led the work, said the gels could be used to design a community early warning system — a platform that attracts and watches mosquitoes in the area before mosquito-borne diseases get out of hand. “Having hundreds of these in the wild — in some kind of surveillance array — could be beneficial if you’re trying to detect mosquito infection in the wild,” she said.
The team also thinks this could be a low-cost system for inventing and testing insect repellents. “The beauty of it is that it’s trying to mimic human skin—rather than using a real person,” says Perran Ross, a medical entomologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, who was not involved in the work. “This is really useful for researching mosquito repellents. If using real people is not feasible, this is really a good method.”
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Inventing a new mosquito repellent is actually a big deal, considering the damage these insects can do to your health. As good as today’s insect repellents are, they’re not perfect — and if you really want people to adopt a disease prevention approach, comfort is arguably as important as potency. DEET is the gold standard, but it doesn’t stay active for long, it’s smelly, and it’s harsh on sensitive skin. “There hasn’t been a large-scale effort to really come up with alternatives or better alternatives,” Veiseh said.
