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Insects that smell alike
BY KRISTINE KELLY
In the battle against insect pests, research
from Leslie Vosshall’s laboratory suggests that it’s all
about the sense of smell. Last October, Vosshall and colleagues
demonstrated that one gene, Or83b, is essential for the sense of
smell in fruit flies — when the Or83b receptor is missing,
flies are unable to respond to most odors.
Now, the lab’s new findings, reported in
the February 22 issue of Current
Biology, show that Or83b’s
function appears to be conserved across very different insect
species, including the malaria mosquito, that span 250 million
years of evolution.
Fruit flies have 62 odorant receptor proteins,
61 of which are exclusively expressed in specific neurons. But the
remaining one, Or83b, is found in almost all olfactory neurons, and
serves a general function in detecting odors.
“We looked at Or83b in medflies and corn
earworm moths, which are agricultural pests, and the malaria
mosquito, which feeds on humans,” says Vosshall. “While
they all have very sensitive olfactory systems and very different
food preferences, this odorant receptor is highly conserved across
all of these different species.”
When Vosshall and her colleagues placed Or83b
genes from other species into mutant fruit flies that were missing
their own Or83b gene, they found the flies’ sense of smell
was restored. Not only had the flies regained their missing sense,
but upon further examination, the researchers found that other
odorant receptors — which had been non-functional in the
mutants — were now working correctly. This says that the
mosquito Or83b could interact with fruit fly odorant receptors
— a surprising finding given the different smell preferences
of these two insects.
“Although mosquitoes and flies have very
different opinions about odors, this receptor from mosquito
functionally substitutes in the fly,”Vosshall says. “If we
could exploit this central function of Or83b-like receptors in
insect smell, we might be able to design new insect repellents that
would interfere with the function of Or83b to transport odorant
receptors. This could in effect make mosquitoes ‘blind’
to humans. That in turn would be another weapon in the arsenal to
interrupt vector-borne disease transmission.”
March 18, 2005
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Editor
Zach Veilleux
Science Writers
Lauren Gravitz
Kristine Kelly
Assistant Editor
Talley Henning Brown
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Copyright © 2006
The Rockefeller University
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