The Latest Buzz: New Faculty Member Meg Younger on Her Work with Mosquitoes

Meg Younger, PhD, is relatively new to Boston University—she joined the school’s faculty at the start of this year—but she is already creating a stir with her work on the surprisingly complex olfactory system of the tropical mosquito Aedes aegypti.

Younger has worked with invertebrates since early in her research career. While still in graduate school, she says, she was drawn to the reductionist approach of trying to find “quote-unquote simple systems” in advancing our understanding of how the brain works.

She spent roughly a decade working with the fruit fly—a model organism in countless disciplines—first studying circadian rhythms and then delving into the fundamental mechanisms of synaptic transmission. It was only more recently that she refocused her investigative attention on the mosquito—not least because of the profound global and public health relevance of research into the invertebrates.

“There are so many important problems in the world to work on,” she says. “This is one where I felt I had a skillset I could apply.”

Mosquitoes are responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year, as they carry the viruses and parasites behind a catalog of potentially fatal diseases, from yellow fever and malaria to West Nile and Zika. Efforts to reduce the transmission of mosquito-borne disease have included development of both repellents to keep the insects away and attractants to lures them into traps, and this requires an improved understanding of what draws them to people in the first place.

In a high-profile study reported in August in the journal Cell, Younger and colleagues shed important new light on this question. Researchers have long understood that mosquitoes are drawn to a collection of odors emanating from the human body—and assumed that the olfactory system governing this process is organized in a particular way. But as Younger and team found in the Cell study, the olfactory system is much more complex than scientists previously believed. This complexity goes a long way toward explaining why developing effective repellents and attractants has proved so difficult. The insights Younger and the others gleaned from their study offers a possible road map for finding a more potent repellent, or for building a better mosquito trap.

Younger and her lab at BU are well positioned to take on this challenge. To date, she has used a range of imaging technologies in her research, including confocal imaging and two-photon microscopy among others. But because the mosquito is a non-model organism, she hasn’t always had ready access to the types of resources she needs. Researchers working with model organisms like mice can call on existing tools for many aspects of their studies, from genetic techniques to express calcium indicators to the hardware that makes the imaging possible. But this isn’t necessarily the case for Younger and her team, who have often had to build tools from scratch.

Here is where the Neurophotonics Center enters the picture. “The NPC is a perfect resource for me,” she says, “especially with all the different options for microscopy.” She plans to use the multiphoton microscopes at the center to image activity in the brain of mosquitoes as they are presented with human odor, in order to understand how the mosquito sense of smell works.

But access to the technology she and her group need is by no means the only benefit of the collaboration. Younger also views the center as an essential training ground, where investigators can gain in-depth understandings of how and why the tools they develop contribute to advances in their research, by rolling up their sleeves and diving headlong into the design and development of specialized instrumentation and techniques.

“Working with the center will provide a great opportunity for trainees to learn about microscopy,” she says. “I’m a big believer in training everyone down to first principles for everything they do.”

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