問題: MedicineBioengineering

Diagnostic Mosquitoes as Body Boring Machines

+1  

Evolve mosquitoes with long proboscises, then photolitographically print a microcircuit to interface with their brain, connect and train a neural net to control it.

YAML 発想

To diagnose a disease (like an internal local infection), a non-invasive way of sampling deep tissues is required. It is obviously very possible to do that with the currently existing medical needles -- just apply enough force, and it'll go through pretty much any tissue, except the hard bonny (unless ultrasound vibration, or rotation is applied, making it drill through them). However, there is still a risk of damaging some nerves or other sensitive structures (like inner ear structures). A modern needle is no boring machine, and there are limits to where they can go, and how non-invasively.

  • 184 μm diameter: the thinnest 34G needles in common use today.
  • 40-100 µm diameter: mosquito proboscis (and it is able to control direction and sense the tissue.) . 17~180 µm: diameter of human hair.
  • 4-6 μm: diameter of electrode wires used by NeuraLink (but they cannot suck blood)

The fascinating thing about mosquito proboscis is that it is able to pry open the further access to tissue using 6 tightly packed needles, with specialized tiny teeth to cut through the skin, and receptors of blood, and specialized needle to inject anticoagulant and anesthetic.

How? Well, since the mosquito head size is perhaps close to 1 mm. Mosquito brain is said to have approx. 220,000 neurons, and with say, a dated 10 nm CPU photolitography process, it would easily be possible to arrange easily 100,000,000 transistors in a square mm, so, perhaps the approach could be -- to cut open a living mosquito head, and insert a very thin silicon wafer with a circuit printed on it. Once connected to a computer, we could learn how to control the movements of proboscis and suction.

The shorcoming of proboscis, is that it is rather short -- just shy of 2 cm for largest of mosquitoes. It may have not evolved a long proboscis, because short one is sufficient to reach blood in most cases. However, it doesn't mean that the proboscis couldn't be artificially evolved to become longer, for example, by artificially selecting mosquitoes by giving to bite for blood over a thicker honeycomb-like structure, that prevents the mosquito head from approaching too close to the skin, so that only mosquitoes with relatively longer proboscis could reach the blood for survival. Such selection could perhaps evolve mosquitoes with very long proboscis, that then could be used for medicinal purposes.

Sure, I anticipate your worries about someone releasing mosquitoes with very long proboscises to the wild.

Mindey,

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// 蚊の頭が皮膚に近づきすぎないように、より厚いハニカム状の構造の上に血を求めて噛むことにより、蚊を選択的に繁殖させ、比較的長いテングを持つ蚊だけが生存のために血液に到達できるようにします //

これは、家庭の条件下で実行可能でなければなりません!蚊の幼虫を集めるために窓の外でバケツの水を取り、その「ハニカムのような構造」を選択するだけです.ただし、蚊は病気の媒介となるため、現地の法律や規制に確認する必要があります。しかし、これは素晴らしい YouTube ビデオ ストーリーになると思います。

// selectively breeding mosquitoes by giving to bite for blood over a thicker honeycomb-like structure, that prevents the mosquito head from approaching too close to the skin, so that only mosquitoes with relatively longer proboscis could reach the blood for survival //

This has to be doable under home conditions! Just take a bucket of water outside the window to collect mosquito larvae, and make that "honeycomb-like structure" for selecting. However, due to mosquito being a vector for disease transmission, this needs to be checked with local laws and regulations. However, I think this could be a nice YouTube video story.


今、COVID テスト ストリップを見ると、クロマトグラフを行う腹を持つ蚊を思い浮かべます。

Now, COVID test strips make me think of mosquitoes with bellies that do chromatography.