Research Entomologist United States Department of Agriculture Gainesville, Florida, United States
Abstract: Resistance to currently utilized chemical insecticides and repellents represents a significant threat to public health. Better understanding the neurophysiological and musculoskeletal effects of currently available and candidate insecticides and repellents may help identify and develop novel chemical control tools. Here we highlight novel methods of recording nerve firing and muscle excitatory postsynaptic potentials in Aedes aegypti. In short, larval mosquitoes were dissected to expose the ventral nerve cord or lateral abdominal body-wall muscles to allow recordings using extracellular or intracellular microelectrodes. These methods represent new tools for probing the tissue-level effects of current and candidate chemical control tools on the market today. Not only can these methods be used to evaluate the potential of current and novel control chemistries to affect insect nervous system and muscles, they can also aid in elucidating the mechanisms of insecticides and repellents. This presentation will briefly describe these methods and discuss their potential for the field of public health vector control.
