Mosquito taste receptors for detecting human sweat and initiating blood feeding

The World Health Organization estimates around 725,000 mosquito related deaths a year. This makes mosquitoes one of the deadliest animals on Earth. Mosquitoes bite us humans to get nutrients and pass deadly diseases to us as a consequence. It is well studied that mosquitoes rely on their sense of smell to find us. Yet, what tiggers them to bite us once they land on our skin is unknown. We hypothesize that mosquitoes use their sense of taste to trigger the biting behaviour. In addition, taste receptors on their legs play a crucial role in triggering biting. We will test this by first identifying which receptors will respond to human sweat. This will be done by presenting individual receptors with human sweat and identifying the ones that respond. We will then follow up by removing these receptors from the legs of mosquitoes to see if they will still bite. This will allow us to find the receptors that trigger the biting behaviour in mosquitoes. With this information, we can find safe compounds to deter mosquito biting. We can also design mosquitoes that are bad at biting to be released into the wild to produce offspring that are bad at biting as well. A combination of these methods can protect us from mosquito diseases.