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(单词翻译)
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.
"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 itching2 pretty bad when they have hundreds of mosquito bites on their arms."
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 genetically3 determined4. So they sequenced the genomes of 48 arabiensis mosquitoes from Tanzania which had fed on either humans or cows.
And they found that bugs5 with cow blood in their bellies6 had one partially7 rearranged chromosome8, 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. [Bradley J Main et al., The Genetic1 Basis of Host Preference and Resting Behavior in the Major African Malaria9 Vector, Anopheles arabiensis]
If that genetic switch really does make cows more attractive than we are to mosquitoes, in theory we could genetically engineer them to steer10 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."
—Christopher Intagliata
[The above text is a transcript11 of this podcast.]
1 genetic | |
adj.遗传的,遗传学的 | |
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2 itching | |
adj.贪得的,痒的,渴望的v.发痒( itch的现在分词 ) | |
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3 genetically | |
adv.遗传上 | |
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4 determined | |
adj.坚定的;有决心的 | |
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5 bugs | |
adj.疯狂的,发疯的n.窃听器( bug的名词复数 );病菌;虫子;[计算机](制作软件程序所产生的意料不到的)错误 | |
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6 bellies | |
n.肚子( belly的名词复数 );腹部;(物体的)圆形或凸起部份;腹部…形的 | |
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7 partially | |
adv.部分地,从某些方面讲 | |
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8 chromosome | |
n.染色体 | |
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9 malaria | |
n.疟疾 | |
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10 steer | |
vt.驾驶,为…操舵;引导;vi.驾驶 | |
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11 transcript | |
n.抄本,誊本,副本,肄业证书 | |
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