Earlier this week, a colleague and I took advantage of an unexpected holiday to drop a canoe in the river. As we were walking out, we noticed a dramatic difference in our relative appeal to the Sucarnochee mosquitoes. I was ignored, he was the buffet. No surprise there - there's been a lot of work looking at the variety of cues that mosquitoes use to zero in on their next meal. Carbon dioxide, lactic acid, and an organic chemical known as octenol have all been implicated. Well, a new study in PLoS One takes a closer look at the process. Octenol forms enatiomers - sterioisomers that are mirror images of each other. Enatiomers can have different properties, and octenol is no exception. The PLoS study, performed by Jonathan Bohbot and J
oseph Dickens from the Department of Agriculture, uses manipulated frog eggs to mimic the manner in which the mosquitoes would respond to the right-handed and left-handed enatiomers of octenol. That's the right-handed version to the right. They found that the right-handed form elicited a greater response than it's left-handed isomer. This is the first demonstration of the ability to detect "handedness" in insects, and should lead to a better understanding of how to ward off the little guys. Given the potpourri of disease organisms they carry, that's nothing but good news.
Interesting work at the boundary of biology and physics. Researchers looking at the manner in which loggerhead sea turtle hatchlings manouver their way through the sand on their way to the sea find that the little guys are able to adapt the manner in which they use their flippers to move easily across different types of surfaces. Next step - robotics.
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