小柯机器人

美国普林斯顿大学Carolyn S. McBride和美国康奈尔大学Zhilei Zhao共同合作取得重要进展。他们研究发现蚊子的大脑能对人类气味的独特特征进行编码，以驱动寻找宿主。该项研究成果2022年5月4日在线发表于《自然》杂志上。

在这里，研究人员表明，人类和动物的气味会唤起埃及伊蚊（Ae）触角叶内不同组合的嗅觉小球的活动。特别是一个肾小球被人类气味强烈激活，但对其它动物气味反应微弱或根本没有反应。这种对人类敏感的肾小球对长链醛类十醛和十一醛有选择性的调节，他们发现这两种醛类在人类的气味中持续富集，而且可能来自于人类独特的皮肤脂质。

使用合成混合物，研究人员进一步证明，在风洞中，人类敏感的肾小球中的信号传递明显增强了远距离的宿主寻找行为，再现了对人类而不是动物气味的偏好。他们的研究表明，动物大脑可以将与先天生物学相关的复杂气味刺激提炼成简单的神经代码，并揭示设计下一代蚊虫控制策略的目标。

据介绍，埃及伊蚊（Ae）是一种全球入侵型蚊子，专门叮咬人类，这使它成为一种有效的疾病媒介。寻找宿主的雌性蚊子强烈地喜欢人类的气味，而不是动物的气味，但它们是如何区分人类和动物的气味的还不清楚。脊椎动物的气味是挥发性化学物质的复杂混合物，其中有许多共同的成分，这使得辨别气味成为一项有趣的感官编码挑战。

附：英文原文

Title: Mosquito brains encode unique features of human odour to drive host seeking

Author: Zhao, Zhilei, Zung, Jessica L., Hinze, Annika, Kriete, Alexis L., Iqbal, Azwad, Younger, Meg A., Matthews, Benjamin J., Merhof, Dorit, Thiberge, Stephan, Ignell, Rickard, Strauch, Martin, McBride, Carolyn S.

Issue&Volume: 2022-05-04

Abstract: A globally invasive form of the mosquito Aedes aegypti specializes in biting humans, making it an efficient disease vector1. Host-seeking female mosquitoes strongly prefer human odour over the odour of animals2,3, but exactly how they distinguish between the two is not known. Vertebrate odours are complex blends of volatile chemicals with many shared components4,5,6,7, making discrimination an interesting sensory coding challenge. Here we show that human and animal odours evoke activity in distinct combinations of olfactory glomeruli within the Ae. aegypti antennal lobe. One glomerulus in particular is strongly activated by human odour but responds weakly, or not at all, to animal odour. This human-sensitive glomerulus is selectively tuned to the long-chain aldehydes decanal and undecanal, which we show are consistently enriched in human odour and which probably originate from unique human skin lipids. Using synthetic blends, we further demonstrate that signalling in the human-sensitive glomerulus significantly enhances long-range host-seeking behaviour in a wind tunnel, recapitulating preference for human over animal odours. Our research suggests that animal brains may distil complex odour stimuli of innate biological relevance into simple neural codes and reveals targets for the design of next-generation mosquito-control strategies.

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-022-04675-4

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04675-4

Nature：《自然》，创刊于1869年。隶属于施普林格·自然出版集团，最新IF：69.504
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