(soft music) - [Announcer] Many of us tend to forget about mosquitoes until we hear their buzz or feel their bites.

But at a research lab in South Bend, run by IU and Notre Dame, they can't get enough of the little guys.

- I'm Molly Duman Scheel and I am a professor at Indiana University School of Medicine in South Bend and went to the University of Chicago.

That involved looking at comparative insect developmental genetics and then ended up getting into mosquito work.

Though when I started a lab years later, I had a wonderful opportunity to come back here to South Bend and then it just took off from there.

Everyone at Notre Dame works on mosquitoes.

If you come to Notre Dame, you start working on mosquitoes.

- My name is Dave Severson.

I've worked on mosquitoes pretty much my whole career and I've spent a lot of time in tropical areas where a lot of the disease is.

And so it's been my passion, it's been my work life.

This is pretty exciting stuff that we've been working on now the past several years.

- [Announcer] But Molly and Dave don't just study the mosquitoes, they actually raise them.

- So right next to the lab we have an insectary and that's where we actually rear the mosquitoes.

And mosquitoes lay eggs in water, and then the larvae will emerge from those eggs swimming around in the water, eating throughout the larva phase.

Then there's the pupal phase, which if you think of a butterfly, it would be the equivalent of a cocoon, only for mosquitoes that actually also occurs in water and then pupae emerging into an adult - [Announcer] Each year across the Hoosier state, it seems mosquitoes always come back stronger and in larger amounts, but Molly and Dave have a simple explanation.

- You know, if you think about Aedes mosquitoes, they are in water filled containers.

You could have that be a tree hole, you could have that be a container in your backyard.

It could be a tire in a junkyard, just takes a little bit of water.

And then if you think about getting the insecticides to all those different places, it's really a challenge.

- You know, there are close to 4,000 different species of mosquito on the planet, all very distinct.

To my knowledge, I don't think there's anything that mosquitoes haven't been able to become resistant to, except I think the technology that we're working on here.

- [Announcer] While traditional insecticides focus on killing mosquitoes, Molly and her team are more focused on feeding them.

But this tasty, eco-friendly treat is also a targeted attack.

- So we've been interested in killing the larvae.

One way to kill them is really to deliver this yeast to these water filled containers where the mosquitoes are breeding.

They love to eat the yeast, it's like a donut to them.

They're gonna come in and feast on that yeast and then it will actually turn off some genes that are required for their survival and kill them just specifically.

We can look at the sequences within the genes.

We can compare and find things that are just in the mosquitoes and then not in honeybees or other insects.

We look at those sequences then, and we can clone the gene, so that allows for the expression of the RNA insecticide, put it into the yeast, and then we just grow the yeast in culture.

And we can do that by shaking it or we can have these larger bioreactors.

Ours are about five liters, you can go up to a thousand liters if you get to an industrial scale fermentation.

That's the nice thing about the yeast, you can make a lot of it quickly and cheaply, and I think that's one of the benefits of this control mechanism.

- [Announcer] This research, while impressive, is only half the battle.

How are everyday people like you and me supposed to use this form of mosquito control.

- So we've always got the average person in mind.

They really like the idea of not having a chemical pesticide and fumes.

We have formulations that are stable for long periods of time, and that would be easy for them to say, put a tablet of yeast in a water filled container in their backyard.

We actually have ideas too, about having soda that would be attractive with our yeast in it.

We are hoping actually to have like a hummingbird like feeder that someone would take a tablet of yeast and then just screw that little bottle right in and go hang it in their backyard.

So ease of delivery, things that people could do easily is always something that interests us.

- [Announcer] With climate change causing rising temperatures year over year, Molly says that mosquito control will only become more important.

- You know, you're gonna potentially spread the range of West Nile virus.

So some of these mosquitoes, like Aedes aegypti, that were typically south of Indiana, are gonna start creeping up and coming up here.

It's not the same problem that it is in Africa or in South America, but the potential is certainly there.

You know, that's your big concern is the spreading of the ranges.

- [Announcer] When I asked Molly what we could do to help, she had a basic request.

- You need to invest in new mosquito control mechanisms now.

You need to invest in new insecticides now because what we have now isn't going to be sufficient in the future.

And if we're not prepared, we're in real trouble.

Just to support research and basic science.

You know, I'm a basic scientist.

I was studying genes in brine shrimp as a graduate student and looking at that development and then ended up getting into mosquito work and we had no idea where this was going when we started it.

Having the freedom to explore that has been critical to our lab.

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