deadliest in the world Animals are likes and dislikes. Mosquitoes like to feed because they carry viral diseases such as Zika and Chikungunya, as well as the parasites that cause malaria. egyptian temple More than 700,000 people die each year worldwide.
But in Omid Veiseh’s lab at Rice University, his team of bioengineers had trouble feeding mosquitoes. Researchers typically study mosquito feeding by having live animals (laboratory mice, or graduate students and postdocs who donate arms for science) bite. This is not ideal. This is because laboratory animals are expensive, impractical to work with, and their use can raise ethical concerns. A student’s arm doesn’t scale well on large scale tests.
Rice’s team, working with entomologists at Tulane University, wanted to develop a way to study mosquito behavior without the challenges of experimenting with large numbers of animals. Their solution was something completely different. It’s real blood encased in a lifeless hydrogel. “It feels like jelly,” says Weisse. “Mosquitoes have to chew on the jelly to get to the blood.”
At least, in theory. Insects may not bite. Sometimes they couldn’t get the straw-like prongs through. “It was a big moment of discovery for us,” says Veiseh. “We saw this mosquito crawling on the gel, biting and sucking blood.”
write in a diary today frontiers of bioengineering and biotechnology, The team describes a scalable platform for testing mosquito behavior. Their 3D-printed hydrogel mimics skin and contains zigzag channels that can pump real blood. To test the gels, the researchers pointed cameras at them and used computer vision algorithms to quickly analyze how many mosquitoes flew into the buffet through their mouths. Mosquitoes have been shown to refuse to eat when smelled.
Tulane medical entomologist Dawn Wesson, who co-led the study, said the gel could be used to design community warning systems. “Hundreds of these things in the field could be beneficial in some sort of surveillance array if you’re trying to detect mosquito infections in the wild,” she says.
The team also believes this could be a low-cost system for inventing and testing repellents. That’s what we do,” says Perran Roth, a medical entomologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia. “This is a great way to look up mosquito repellents. If using a real person isn’t practical, this is a very good way to go.”
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Given the health hazards these insects pose, inventing new mosquito repellents is actually a big deal. Today’s repellents work well, but they aren’t perfect. Comfort is as important as efficacy if you want people to truly adopt disease prevention methods. “There hasn’t been a massive effort to really come up with alternatives or better ideas,” he says.
