Malaria lures mosquitoes to people. Free Technical Library News

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Malaria lures mosquitoes to humans

30.04.2018

Malaria parasites, as you know, live in two houses - in the sense that different stages of their life cycle take place in a mosquito and in some vertebrate: for someone it is a rodent, for someone it is a bird, for someone it is a reptile , someone has a person.
The choice of hosts is quite logical: while the mosquito sucks the blood of an animal, the malarial plasmodium can go where it needs to go at the moment. To ensure that there are no delays with the relocation, Plasmodium even change the smell of animals, making it more tempting for mosquitoes. It is also known that people with malaria are more attractive to bloodsuckers. It is clear that Plasmodium also alters human odor, and a recent article in PNAS describes how they do this.

Researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Diseases, along with colleagues from other European and African research centers, compared the composition of sweat in several dozen Kenyan schoolchildren, among whom were both healthy and recently infected with malaria.
Children's socks were placed in two special boxes connected by tubes, after which malarial mosquitoes were launched into the device. Insects flew mainly to the socks of those children who had a malaria parasite. After a three-week course of treatment, only 60% of mosquitoes flew to the clothes of sick schoolchildren - obviously, the fewer parasites there were in a person, the less he was interested in bloodsuckers. In general, the results of the experiment with clothes once again confirmed that malaria makes us more attractive to mosquitoes.

Then the researchers began to find out exactly what substances attract insects to us. To do this, sweat samples were first analyzed for chemical composition, and then each of the substances found in it was given a try by mosquitoes. "Try" here means that the antennas of the mosquitoes were blown with air containing one or another odorous component, while simultaneously reading with the help of special electrodes the neural signals that the antennas of the mosquitoes sent to the brain.

As a result, it was possible to identify several compounds that especially strongly excited insects and which were especially numerous in the sweat of patients. Among them were heptane, octane and nonane aldehydes used in perfumery due to their smells (for example, heptane aldehyde gives a clove aroma, and nonane - orange or pink). Obviously, their mixture attracts mosquitoes especially strongly, and human plasmodia in the course of evolution attacked the right recipe.

Curiously, mosquitoes reacted differently to an increase in odor: if the amount of heptanealdehyde in the mixture increased sharply, the insects flew to the smell much more actively, but if the amount of aldehyde increased smoothly, the mosquitoes remained indifferent.

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