A genetic discovery could prevent disease-carrying mosquitoes from ever maturing.
Naoki Yamanaka, an entomologist at UCR, found that an important steroid hormone is required to enter or leave fruit fly cells. Themolting hormone is a hormone. fly will never mature or reproduce without it
ecdysone was taught in textbooks that it was easy to slip past the cells. Yamanaka said that they now know that is not the case.
Every insect needs ecdysone for their journey from egg to offspring- producing adult. Every insect that Yamanaka has tested has at least one of the ecdysone transporters. He found that mosquitoes were different.
There are only three of the four transporters that mosquitoes possess. The most important ecdysone transporter is missing from them.
Yamanaka said that the primary one is missing.
The findings have been published in the national academy of sciences
The discovery opens the door to a mosquito-specific pesticide that wouldn't harm bees. The Aedes aegypti mosquitoes used in the study would be affected by it.
Yamanaka said that chemicals could be developed to block the functions of the ecdysone transporters but not the original one. Off-target effects would be low.
A study led by cell biologist Sachiko Haga-Yamanaka is trying to find a way to transport hormones in humans.
"Textbooks say that steroid hormones can travel into and out of human cells, but based on our insect research, we don't think that's true," Yamanaka said.
The National Institute of Health funded Yamanaka's research. His lab is screening for chemicals that can block mosquitoes. ecdysone transporters are being investigated in other animals.
Local populations of mosquitoes can't be bred using other methods. Eggs that do not hatch are the result of sterile, irradiated male mosquitoes being released into the wild to mate with females.
Yamanaka feels it is important to develop additional tools so we can handle mosquito related issues in many different scenarios, even though there are effective methods for controlling local populations of mosquitoes.
Yamanaka said it is impossible to eradicate mosquitoes. One tool is not enough to control them. They are only likely to become a bigger problem in Southern California as the climate warms up.
More information: Lewis V. Hun et al, Essential functions of mosquito ecdysone importers in development and reproduction, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2202932119 Journal information: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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