Chapter 22: Mosquito heat seeking: the molecular and cellular basis of a key driver of blood-feeding behaviour

C. Greppi; P.A. Garrity

Chapter 22: Mosquito heat seeking: the molecular and cellular basis of a key driver of blood-feeding behaviour

In: Sensory ecology of disease vectors

Authors:

C. Greppi

C. Greppi Department of Biology and Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02453, USA.
Current address: Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.

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P.A. Garrity

P.A. Garrity Department of Biology and Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02453, USA.

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Type:: Chapter

Pages:: 605–619

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.3920/978-90-8686-932-9_22

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Body heat is an important host-associated cue that stimulates vector mosquito blood feeding. Body heat exerts its effect near the host, promoting some of the final stages of the behavioural program that leads to blood feeding, including short-range attraction, landing and probing. Mosquitoes detect body heat via highly sensitive thermosensory neurons, which respond to conductive and convective heat transfer from the host. Although heat seeking involves responses to warmth, recent work in Anopheles gambiae implicates a set of cooling-activated (and warming-inhibited) antennal thermoreceptors, the Cooling Cells, as major drivers of this behaviour. The Cooling Cells are slowly adapting, phasic thermoreceptors, which report recent temperature changes, rather than absolute temperature. As temperature-change detectors, Cooling Cells are well-suited to sense thermal gradients, e.g. those near warm-blooded hosts. At the molecular level, the ionotropic receptor IR21a is required for Cooling Cell thermosensing, and mosquitoes lacking IR21a are defective in heat-seeking and heat-induced blood feeding. This receptor is highly conserved among insects, and its role in cooling detection predates the evolution of blood feeding. This suggests that the evolution of heat seeking in Anopheles mosquitoes involved repurposing a pre-existing thermosensory pathway. The loss of IR21a decreases, but does not eliminate, heat seeking, suggesting additional thermosensory neurons and receptor molecules also contribute. Although heat-seeking mosquitoes are attracted to temperatures associated with warm-blooded hosts (~31 to 40 °C), they still avoid noxious temperatures (≥50 °C), in part through the actions of the transient receptor potential channel, TrpA1. Such high temperature nociception restrains heat seeking, preventing it from leading animals into regions with dangerously high temperatures. While progress has been made at the sensory periphery, how detection of other sensory cues, e.g. carbon dioxide, promotes heat seeking (often sex-specifically) remain unknown, as are the circuits through which thermosensory, and other sensory input, combine to control attraction, landing and probing.

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Sensory ecology of disease vectors

E-Book ISBN:: 9789086869329

Publisher:: Wageningen Academic

Print Publication Date:: 18 Dec 2022

Subjects
- Life Sciences
  - General
  - Animal & Veterinary

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Chapter 22: Mosquito heat seeking: the molecular and cellular basis of a key driver of blood-feeding behaviour

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Sensory ecology of disease vectors

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