How fruit flies can teach us about curing chronic pain and halting mosquito-borne diseases
Date: 7.12.2011
Studies of a protein that fruit flies use to sense heat and chemicals may someday provide solutions to human pain and the control of disease-spreading mosquitoes. In the current issue of Nature, biologist Paul Garrity of the National Center for Behavioral Genomics at Brandeis University and his team, spearheaded by KyeongJin Kang and Vince Panzano in the Garrity lab, discover how fruit flies distinguish the warmth of a summer day from the pungency of wasabi by using TRPA1, a protein whose human relative is critical for pain and inflammation.
This work on TRPA1 can explain how blood-sucking insects like mosquitoes discriminate noxious chemicals, which repel them, from the warmth of a human, which attracts them," says Garrity. "By activating one kind of TRPA1 you might be able to deter mosquitoes from biting you, while activating the other kind of TRPA1 might lure mosquitoes to a trap."
Since human TRPA1 is a drug target aimed at treating diseases such as asthma, migraines, and chronic pain, Garrity says it's important to understand how TRPA1 proteins operate.
