Team:Queens Canada/Project/Overview

Mosquitoes can serve as vectors for a variety of diseases in endemic areas, including malaria, West Nile and dengue fever. The World Health Organization reported that there were 219 million cases of malaria in 2010 alone, 660,000 of which resulted in death (citation). Mosquitoes have been found to use several airborne chemical cues to locate a blood-meal, which act as ligands for its olfactory receptors. These chemical cues include a host’s skin emanations, exhaled air, and urine. In particular, the African mosquito Anopheles gambiae was shown to be four times more attracted to foot odour when infected with the malarial parasite, Plasmodium falciparum (Zwiebel and Takken, 2011). In our project, we chose to focus on isovaleric acid, which is a key component of foot odour and is produced by Staphylococcus epidermidis, a resident species of normal cutaneous flora.