科学美国人60秒:Some Malaria Mosquitoes May Prefer Cows to Us

As you've probably experienced firsthand, some mosquito species have a real taste for warm, human blood. So much so that if you raise them on it the lab, they'll accept no substitute.
你可能亲身经历过，有些蚊子喜欢品尝温暖的人类血液。所以，如果你在实验室里养蚊子，它们可就会只品尝人类的血液了!
"Fortunately, I don't get major reactions at all." Brad Main is a mosquito geneticist at U.C. Davis… and part-time mosquito meal provider. "So it's not too bad for me. But some people in the lab are itching pretty bad when they have hundreds of mosquito bites on their arms."
幸运的是，我几乎没有任何的反应。布拉德·梅因是戴维斯加利福尼亚大学的蚊子遗传学家，同时也是蚊子食物的兼职提供者。“所以，这对我来说，感觉并不是太坏。但是实验室有些人，当数百只蚊子叮咬他们的手臂的时候，他们会感觉奇痒无比。”
Out in the wild, some species are less picky. Take Anopheles arabiensis, common in East Africa. They'll feed on cattle, dogs, goats, pigs, people—wherever they can find a warm meal. But what Main and his colleagues wanted to know was whether the bloodsuckers' choice of victim might be genetically determined. So they sequenced the genomes of 48 arabiensis mosquitoes from Tanzania which had fed on either humans or cows.
但是在野外环境中，有些蚊子非常的挑剔。以阿拉伯疟蚊为例，这种蚊子在东亚地区非常的常见。它们吸食牛、狗、山羊、猪和人类的血液——因为这样它们可以享受一顿热腾腾的餐点。但是梅因和同事们想要知道这些吸血鬼们选择受害者是否由基因决定。所以，他们排列了从坦桑尼亚采集的48种阿拉伯疟蚊的基因组，这些疟蚊要么吸食人血要么吸食牛血。
And they found that bugs with cow blood in their bellies had one partially rearranged chromosome, compared to those who'd snacked on human blood… which could explain the preferences in meal choices. The study is in the journal PLoS Genetics.
研究发现，与吸食人血的疟蚊相比，肚子中都是牛血的疟蚊体内含有部分重组的基因组，这就解释了在食物选择中，疟蚊有所偏好的原因。该研究结果发表在《公共遗传学》杂志上。
If that genetic switch really does make cows more attractive than we are to mosquitoes, in theory we could genetically engineer them to steer clear of people. And their cow victims don't get human malaria. "It's a case of knowing your enemy. So the better we know these mosquitoes, the better equipped we're going to be to control them."
如果基因切换牛对于蚊子来说，比人类更具有吸引力，那么在理论上，我们就可以通过基因工程来让蚊子不要吸食人血。同时牛类受害者没有患有人类疟疾。这就是“了解你的敌人”的一个案例。所以，我们对这些蚊子了解的越多，我们就能更好的控制它们。