And when you meet Dave and visit his website and look at his approach to what is really a very challenging field and look at it because it’s such a feast for the eyes. Now, there really is a magical quality about the way Dave approaches this incredibly challenging and complex field of sleep medicine. Dave began his career practising primary health care, but after a handful of years in practise, he followed in his own words, “My own white rabbit into a whole new world called sleep medicine.”. Dave attended medical school at Duke University and completed his internship and residency in Internal Medicine in Boston at Massachusetts General Hospital. Well, my guest today is worth exploring with. There’s always another aspect to it, a different perspective that is worth exploring. And as I have said, every time I speak to someone on the subject, be it sleep, breathe, nourish, move, think or any other thing. Well, this week we explore sleep again, and together we breathe, sleep and breathe are foundational pillars. The verdict is still out on the effectiveness of genetic modifications unrelated to smell, such as engineering mosquito offspring to be non-biting males.Īs Christopher Potter, a biologist at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who was not involved in the research, tells New Scientist’s Corryn Wetzel, these and other related studies are “changing the dogma of what we thought we knew about the olfactory system.Dr Dave McCarty: Empowered Sleep Apnoea Introduction Instead, it suggests that scientists and public health experts should direct their attention and resources to other methods, such as creating better traps or repellents. This new research reveals that editing the insects’ smell-related genes likely won’t be an effective way to stop them. “You can’t find a single person on Earth that hasn’t been bitten at least once.” “They’re really the ultimate predator,” says Omar Akbari, a biologist at the University of California San Diego who was not involved in the study, to The Atlantic’s Katherine J. Mosquitos are the deadliest animal on the planet, responsible for more than 700,000 deaths each year and for causing millions of preventable illnesses. Scientists are so keen to understand how mosquitoes find their prey, because the bugs are responsible for passing along dengue, Zika, West Nile, yellow fever, malaria, chikungunya and many other dangerous pathogens to humans. “Maybe this is a setup to find a human regardless of what variety of human body odor that human is emitting.”Ĭynthia Goldsmith / Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “Different people can smell very different from one another,” says Meg Younger, a neurobiologist at Boston University and one of the study’s authors, to Science News’ Erin Garcia de Jesús. Researchers aren’t sure why mosquitoes have this built-in redundancy in their smelling system, but one possible reason could be the vast diversity of odors they might encounter in their search for blood. This means that if one human-smell receptor isn’t working for some reason, the bugs have a backup. They found that a single olfactory neuron could contain multiple receptors, not just one as they’d previously assumed. To find out why, they took a closer look at the neurons through RNA sequencing. But when they exposed the bugs to human aromas and analyzed their neuronal activity, the researchers realized the mosquitoes were still picking up the scent. The scientists expected these tweaks to hamper the neurons’ ability to detect human body odor and pass that information along to the brain. (Only female mosquitoes bite, as they rely on blood to nourish their eggs.) They disabled certain human-odor receptors on sensory neurons in the antennae of female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. With this in mind, researchers used gene-editing technology in an attempt to prevent the pesky insects from sniffing out humans. Different kinds of these neurons can combine to identify more complex smells, but each neuron has only one receptor, corresponding to one particular scent. New research offers a possible explanation: Mosquitoes have a highly sophisticated olfactory system that gives them smelling superpowers, suggests a paper published last week in the journal Cell.įor decades, scientists believed that animals' sense of smell worked in a rather basic way: Information-carrying sensory neurons each pick up one specific odor and send that data to the brain. Anyone who’s ever felt the subtle sting of a mosquito bite and delivered a sharp slap to the affected area has probably wondered: How are mosquitoes so good at hunting down humans? The moment we step outside, it seems, they arrive en masse, ready to suck nutrient-rich blood from their next victim.
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