Skip to main content

Scientists have sequenced the bed bug's entire genome in search of clues on how to kill it

bed bug genome sequenced 2016 bedbug remedy
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Due to the recent surge in the world’s bedbug population, the phrase “sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite,” is now more of a cautionary warning than a playful goodnight farewell — but if researchers with the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine have their way, we might not have to worry about these annoying – and painful — pests for much longer.

Researchers with both organizations are mapping the bedbug’s genome in hopes that it would lead to a better understanding of the insect’s behavior. From this, they hope a better pesticide could be created.

Bedbugs have evolved quickly to combat efforts to eradicate them, despite not changing in exterior appearance for nearly 60 million years. One major evolutionary change was the development of a built-in resistance against pesticides: the bedbug can secrete enzymes and proteins to nullify pesticide effects.

This resistance has seemed to only increase in recent years, resulting in a noticeable increase in population since the 1990s. Researchers looked at the genetic makeup of the insect at various life stages to explain this new resistance.

The study found that bedbugs are at their most vulnerable in the “nymph” stage, and seem to only develop the resistance to insecticides after the first blood meal. A future insecticide could be targeted to kill the bedbug in the developmental stage versus attempting to kill older bugs, for example.

With an entire genome in hand, pesticide researchers should be able to create even more effective insecticides that focus on the bedbug’s weak spots, here apparently at or near birth. “This work gives us the genetic basis to explore the bedbug’s basic biology and its adaptation to dense human environments,” study author and museum director George Amato says.

The study was published Tuesday in the journal Nature Communications, and is available in full to read from the journal’s website.

Editors' Recommendations

Ed Oswald
For fifteen years, Ed has written about the latest and greatest in gadgets and technology trends. At Digital Trends, he's…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more