Lisa Baik: Understanding Taste System of Deadly Mosquitoes
She'll Present Seminar at 12:10 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 1 in 122 Briggs Hall
Lisa Baik, assistant professor of insect biology, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology (ENT), will speak on “Understanding and Targeting the Taste System of Deadly Mosquitoes” at the department's first fall seminar, set for 12:10 p.m., Wednesday, Oct. 1 in 122 Briggs Hall.
Her seminar will be broadcast on Zoom at https://ucdavis.zoom.us/j/95882849672.
"Mosquitoes are dangerous vectors of deadly diseases," Baik writes in her abstract. "The taste system controls many insect behaviors but is greatly understudied in mosquitoes. Little is known about how tastants are encoded in mosquitoes or how they regulate critical behaviors."
"Here we examine how taste stimuli are encoded by the Aedes albopictus mosquito, a highly invasive disease vector, and how these cues influence biting, feeding, and egg laying," she noted. "We find that neurons of the labellum, the major taste organ of the head, differentially encode a wide variety of human and other cues. We identify three functional classes of taste sensilla with an expansive coding capacity. Unexpectedly, in addition to excitatory responses we discover strikingly prevalent inhibitory responses, which are predictive of biting behavior. Certain bitter compounds suppress physiological and behavioral responses to sugar, suggesting their use as potent stop signals against appetitive cues. Complex cues, including human sweat, nectar, and egg-laying site water, elicit distinct response profiles from the neuronal repertoire. We identify key tastants on human skin and in sweat that synergistically promote biting behaviors.
"We also identified a new class of compounds that deter biting behaviors," Baik continued. "Transcriptomic profiling identifies taste receptors that might be targeted to disrupt behaviors. Our study sheds light on key features of the taste system that suggest new ways of manipulating chemosensory function and controlling mosquito vectors." (See her lab website).
Postdoctoral Researcher at Yale for Six Years
Baik joined ENT this fall from Yale University, where she served as a postdoctoral researcher for six years in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. She worked in the lab of John Carlson, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.
Her research at Yale drew international attention. Baik described the underlying taste perception in the invasive Asian tiger mosquito, Aedes albopictus; generated the first comprehensive map of taste neuron responses in mosquitoes and transcriptomic profiles of A. albopictus taste organs; and identified tastants that influence behaviors including biting, feeding, and egg laying, including those that deter mosquitoes from biting, which could be directly useful in reducing the spread of disease-causing pathogens.
She also established the base recording electrophysiology technique and several behavioral assays in mosquitoes, and optimized a CRISPR gene editing pipeline in A. albopictus. This work resulted in first-author manuscripts in Nature and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a provisional patent, and a co-author publication in PNAS. One other manuscript and patent is currently under preparation.
Baik is the recipient of several National Institute of Health (NIH) grants, including the current $1 million NIH/NIDCD K99/R00 award for “Taste Perception of Host Cues in the Invasive Disease Vector Mosquito, Aedes albopictus." The NIH/NIDCD K99/R00 grant is the Pathway to Independence Award, a program that funds postdoctoral scientists for up to five years to complete their training and transition to an independent, tenure-track faculty position in a relevant research area for the NIH's National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders (NIDCD). (See feature story)
UC Davis Alumna
A UC Davis alumna, Lisa holds two degrees awarded in 2011: a bachelor of science degree in neurobiology, physiology and behavior, and a bachelor of arts degree in psychology.
Lisa received her doctorate (2019) in physiology and biophysics from UC Irvine. Studying with major professor Todd Holmes, she completed her dissertation on “Short Wavelength Light-Evoked Responses of Drosophila and Mosquitoes.” In her research, she investigated the role of novel photoreceptors in Drosophila and light-modulated behaviors in mosquitoes; discovered that circadian clock and specific light properties coordinate light-induced behaviors in both fruit flies and mosquitoes; and discovered the distinct circadian neural circuits of daytime- and nighttime-active mosquito species. This work resulted in five first-author and two second- author publications, in Nature, PNAS and Current Biology.
Baik is an alumna of the lab of molecular geneticist and physiologist Joanna Chiu, now professor and chair of ENT. In the Chiu lab, Baik investigated molecular and biochemical changes of circadian clock proteins in Drosophila from 2011 to 2013.
For any Zoom technical issues, contact seminar coordinator Marshall McMunn, assistant professor, at msmcmunn@ucdavis.edu.