Vanderbilt University's popular VUCast recently took a tour inside The Zwiebel Lab, led by Vanderbilt Professor Dr. Larry Zwiebel. The major focus of The Zwiebel Lab is to characterize specific genes and their products that control important behavioral processes in the life cycle of insects known to transmit diseases to humans.
"You can't overstate the importance of insect-borne diseases across the world," said Zwiebel. "People believe a child will die every 30 seconds. It's like multiple 747's crashing every day."
Recently, the team discovered that the same receptors used by mosquitoes to find food (such as humans!), are also present on mosquito sperm, where they are important element in the reproductive capacity of those sperm.
This discovery may open up new strategies for population control of insects, and represents a potential new use of a Vanderbilt technology for broad spectrum insect repellents, which you can learn more about here.