Strategic Partner(s)

Why Mosquitoes Hunt You: GPCR Control of Blood Feeding and Mating

Scientific Abstract

A female mosquito that has just fed on human blood stops seeking humans for three to four days while she digests that meal and develops eggs. Laura Duvall's lab has traced this suppression to a specific neuropeptide Y family receptor, one she first identified as a postdoctoral fellow and has since found expressed almost exclusively in an unexpected tissue, the mosquito rectum. Her group works at the intersection of neuropeptide signaling, behavioral genetics, and vector biology in Aedes aegypti, the species responsible for transmitting Zika, dengue, and chikungunya.

This conversation traces her path from circadian rhythm research in Drosophila to mosquito behavior, and lays out why a receptor built to regulate host seeking and mating might offer a way to interrupt pathogen transmission at its source rather than treating each disease separately. What pulls Duvall back to this receptor personally is its apparent conservation: the same NPY family receptor she found in mosquito gut tissue has a close relative in the human colon, doing a job no one has fully worked out yet.

About Laura

Duvall runs a research lab in the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where her group studies how mosquitoes regulate innate behaviors, primarily blood feeding and mating. She trained in neuroscience during her PhD, characterizing how pigment dispersing factor and related GPCRs coordinate circadian clock cells in the Drosophila brain, then moved into mosquito research as a postdoctoral fellow with Leslie Vosshall at Rockefeller University.

Her lab uses CRISPR based gene editing, automated behavioral assays, and video tracking to study neuropeptide Y family receptors in Aedes aegypti, with a particular focus on host seeking suppression and female mating receptivity.

Scientific Themes of the Conversation

- Neuropeptide Y family receptors as conserved regulators of feeding and reproductive behavior

- Host seeking suppression in blood fed females as a druggable behavioral switch

- Cross species pharmacological crosstalk between human and mosquito receptors

- Unexpected receptor localization outside canonical neuronal tissue

- Automated, experimenter free behavioral assays as a response to human bias in the data

- Vector behavior disruption as an alternative to pathogen specific therapeutics

Key Insights from the Conversation

A single gene deletion reopened a closed behavioral window.

Duvall's lab used CRISPR to mutate the receptor she had identified as important for host seeking suppression. Blood fed females that should have lost interest in humans for several days continued seeking hosts anyway. Watching one gene override such a strong, evolutionarily tuned behavioral drive was, in her words, almost magical.

A neuropeptide receptor turned up in a tissue no one expected.

When the lab went looking for where this NPY family receptor was expressed, they assumed brain tissue. Instead, expression was almost exclusive to the mosquito rectum, a structure Duvall says she did not know existed as a distinct entity until the result came back.

The rectal finding stopped looking strange once the mammalian literature caught up.

Humans and other mammals have NPY2 receptors in the colon, and non-neuronal excitable cells there are known to synthesize and release neurotransmitters. Work on neuropod and enterochromaffin cells in mammals has become a guide for what Duvall's lab looks for next in the mosquito gut.

Removing the experimenter from the room removed a source of bias.

Duvall's team built an automated system to deliver host associated cues to mosquitoes around the clock, including at 4am and in darkness, specifically because a human presence, and even which human is present, measurably skews mosquito attraction data.

Baseline attractiveness to mosquitoes is real, stable, and not about soap.

Referencing work from a former labmate, Duvall described how a person's attractiveness to mosquitoes stays consistent over time regardless of shampoo or soap, which is why her lab has to control carefully for who serves as the human stimulus in an assay.

One receptor sits at the intersection of two very different behaviors.

The same NPY family Duvall calls her favorite includes a receptor in the female mosquito that detects a male derived signal after mating and suppresses her receptivity to mate again, sometimes for the rest of her life. Disrupting it experimentally can leave females able to mate with multiple males.

Disrupting one behavior could interrupt transmission of several diseases at once.

Because Aedes aegypti transmits Zika, dengue, and chikungunya through the same host seeking behavior, Duvall argues that turning off attraction to humans at the level of the receptor could block all of these pathogens at their point of transmission, rather than requiring a therapeutic for each one.

Episode Timeline

- Growing up in rural North Carolina, where the path to science ran through a work study job in a lab

- Choosing neuroscience and circadian rhythms as a graduate research focus

- Studying pigment dispersing factor signaling in Drosophila clock cells, and a first entry point into GPCRs

- An interview that turned into a mosquito postdoc with Leslie Vosshall

- Identifying a neuropeptide Y family receptor important for blood feeding regulation

- A CRISPR edit that reopened host seeking behavior in blood fed females

- What CRISPR based mosquito gene editing looks like in practice, from guide design to the olfactometer assay

- Moving to automated, video tracked behavioral assays to remove human bias from the data

- Finding the receptor expressed almost exclusively in the mosquito rectum, and its parallel in the human colon

- Disrupting host seeking behavior as a way to block transmission of Zika, dengue, and chikungunya

- Building a mosquito research facility from scratch, and what day to day lab life looks like

- The receptor behind mating suppression in female mosquitoes, and its favorite status in the lab

Timestamps were generated using AI for readability.

Selected Quotes

"This mutant mosquito disrupting a single gene and changing this incredibly strong behavioral drive was something that was almost magical."

"It's a neuropeptide receptor, but in fact it seems to be expressed exclusively in the mosquito rectum. A tissue that I did not know existed until we got this result."

"There's nothing more satisfying than just sticking your arm in a tube and seeing if you can get them to turn down their attraction to your arm."

"In some ways my view of neuroscience and signaling between the brain and the body is relatively narrow. It's really important to have these sensors everywhere in the system."