How do insect repellents work?
A major focus of my PhD is understanding how commercially available insect repellents such as DEET and picaridin repel female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes. I study these compounds at both the behavioural and neuronal levels, combining custom behavioural rigs, high-speed videography, tracking pipelines, and calcium imaging.
1. Behavioural — the mosquito “HOSTel”
To quantitatively study how repellents reshape behaviour, I built a custom behavioural arena that I call the mosquito HOSTel. It allows me to deliver attractive and aversive stimuli with precise spatial and temporal control while tracking up to ~30 mosquitoes at once with dual high-speed cameras (500 fps).
Individual trajectories and poses are extracted using a transformer-based multi-animal tracking pipeline. This lets me dissect how exploration, approaches, landings, probing and escape responses change as mosquitoes are exposed to different stimulus combinations.
2. Neuronal — calcium imaging
On the neural side, I perform calcium imaging in the sensory appendages of the mosquito to measure how repellents and attractive cues are encoded at the periphery. Over the years I have used multiple imaging modalities, from two-photon to light-sheet microscopy, to capture fast, spatially structured neuronal dynamics in these appendages.
