To understand and fight insect-borne diseases, many humans have sacrificed their arms in aquariums full of mosquitoes. Now, thanks to a new artificial skin soaked with real blood, researchers may be able to protect humans from itching while also gaining a better understanding of what causes mosquitoes to move.
Synthetic skin made from hydrogel. It’s a water-rich, gummy-like wonder material that’s being explored to do everything from purifying water to replacing human cartilage. Developed by and 3D printed at Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. Hydrogel patches are filled with channels that mimic blood vessels and can be infused with a variety of fluids, including blood from humans and other species.
To test the system, the researchers injected the hydrogel with warm human blood and placed six of those patches in a mosquito-filled plastic box. It was also equipped with a camera. The team then used a machine learning model to analyze the video footage to identify whether certain mosquitoes ate the blood inside the hydrogel. The program was effective in distinguishing between the two mosquito states he had a 92.5% chance.
The researchers then coated some hydrogels with the common repellent DEET, others with a plant-based repellent, and left some uncoated. They found that 13.8% of mosquitoes fed on blood in tanks with uncoated patches of synthetic skin. Another possibility they suggest is that mosquitoes are attracted to warm surfaces, so adding hydrogel to blood may be a simple matter of enlarging the size of the patch to promote is to heat the
Mosquitoes did not feed at all in tanks with deet and plant-based repellents.
“This is a big game changer,” said Dawn Wesson, associate professor of tropical medicine at the Tulane School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine. “If we can study how they (mosquitoes) feed and what they do in the process of feeding, we can better understand their potential to transmit disease and perhaps stop them from feeding.” you can do something for
Because researchers don’t have to hire study participants or buy test animals, their breakthrough allows labs to do more experiments at lower costs. They also say the development could lead to a more standardized approach to infectious disease transmission testing.
“This provides a consistent and controlled method of observation,” said Omid Veiseh, lead author of the study and assistant professor of bioengineering at Rice University. “We hope that researchers can use it to identify ways to prevent the spread of the disease in the future.”
Hydrogels and machine-learning systems are already being used in Wesson’s lab to study dengue transmission, but in the future, artificial skin patches could be used in the wild, adjusting the fluid within the hydrogel to target mosquitoes. to find out how is infected. Other species eaters behave. The team may also consider studying other mosquito species.
“All the experiments used laboratory mosquito strains and mostly targeted one specific species. egyptian templeyellow fever virus, dengue virus, Zika virus and other vectors,” Wesson said. frontier science news“It can take time to optimize experimental platforms and machine learning models to study other species, and the behavior of strains in the lab can differ from the behavior of mosquitoes found in the wild.” Therefore, it is important to validate the results on wild mosquito populations.”
“Overall, our results suggest that our experimental platform can be scaled up and adapted to screen different compounds for their effects on mosquitoes,” added Veiseh.
The following videos provide more insight into the research from the researchers involved.
Mosquito feeding chambers use fake skin instead of volunteers to test behavior with technology
A study was published in a journal Frontiers of bioengineering and biotechnology.
Source: Rice University, Frontiers Science News, Tulane University, via EurekAlert
