LC-MS/MS Tracks Mosquito-Spread Pyriproxyfen

New advances in insecticide products show real promise for helping control mosquito populations. That said, there is still a real need for tools that can effectively reach mosquitoes breeding in hidden, hard-to-access spots. India's Defence Research and Development Establishment (DRDE), a major life sciences lab run by India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), ran an experiment to test something interesting: whether mosquitoes could pick up and spread a chemical called pyriproxyfen from painted surfaces. They painted surfaces with a special paint containing this chemical and then tracked whether mosquitoes would carry it into water where they breed. To measure how much of the chemical ended up in the breeding water, they used liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). A paper based on this work was published in the journal Scientific Reports.¹

Why Are Aedes Mosquitoes a Public Health Concern?

Diseases spread by mosquitoes get passed to people when an infected mosquito bites and transfers the virus into the bloodstream. The Aedes mosquito is especially important from a public health standpoint, since the species is the main carrier responsible for spreading diseases like dengue, Zika, chikungunya, yellow fever, West Nile virus, and Rift Valley fever to both humans and animals. Of these, dengue is the most widespread, affecting nearly 4 billion people across 132 countries, with roughly 96 million people developing symptoms and about 40,000 deaths every year.²

How Does Pyriproxyfen Work as a Mosquito Control Tool?

Pyriproxyfen is a well-established chemical that interferes with insect development by mimicking a natural hormone involved in growth. In adult mosquitoes, it works by causing sterility, while in young mosquitoes, it blocks them from properly developing into adults.³ Earlier research has shown that pyriproxyfen can disrupt reproduction in adult mosquitoes and cause young mosquitoes to die by preventing normal development, though it doesn't kill adult mosquitoes directly. Interest in using this chemical through a strategy called "auto-dissemination" picked up after researchers discovered that mosquitoes themselves could be used to carry and spread the chemical to breeding sites.⁴

Can Pyriproxyfen-Based Paint Control Mosquitoes by Having the Insects Themselves Carry the Chemical to Their Breeding Water?

The research team created paint with six different strengths of pyriproxyfen, ranging from very weak (0.075%) to quite strong (16%). They painted small 15 cm × 15 cm squares made of metal, wood, plastic, and ceramic with each version. Then they took young female mosquitoes (5-7 days old) that had just been fed blood and exposed them to these painted surfaces for one hour. This was done using a standard testing setup called a WHO cone bioassay. After the mosquitoes had contact with the painted materials, the researchers moved them into small cages where they could lay their eggs.¹

The chemical pyriproxyfen worked in two ways. First, it reduced how many fertile eggs female mosquitoes could produce. Second, it prevented mosquito larvae and pupae in the water from developing into adults. When researchers looked at the results, they found something interesting: the number of eggs that hatched got smaller as they used higher concentrations of the chemical, and this difference was statistically significant. However, the total number of eggs laid by the females didn't change much regardless of the chemical concentration. In the water stages, the effect was much clearer, as higher concentrations of pyriproxyfen significantly stopped mosquitoes from becoming pupae and then developing into adults. When they used the strongest concentration of the chemical on the mosquitoes, they measured about 7.8 parts per billion of pyriproxyfen in the breeding water using LC-MS/MS.¹

According to the authors of the paper,¹ the results “indicated that mosquitoes successfully autodisseminated pyriproxyfen from the painted surfaces to the breeding habitats. Such formulations could be useful in intervention programs after field-scale evaluation.”

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References

1. Yadav, K.; Dhiman, S.; Acharya, B. N. et al. Mosquito-Mediated Dissemination of Pyriproxyfen from Pyriproxyfen-Based Painted Surfaces Causes Metamorphosis Disruption in Mosquito Aquatic Stages. Sci Rep. 2026.DOI: 10.1038/s41598-026-60286-3
2. World Health Organization. Vector-Borne Diseases. World Health Organization website 2024. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/vector-borne-diseases
3. Yadav, K.; Dhiman, S.; Acharya, B. et al. Pyriproxyfen-Treated Surface Exposure Exhibits Reproductive Disruption in Dengue Vector Aedes aegypti. PLoS Negl. Trop. Dis. 2019, 13, e0007842. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pntd.0007842
4. Itoh, T.; Kawada, H.; Abe, A. et al. Utilization of Blood-Fed Females of Aedes aegypti as a Vehicle for the Transfer of the Insect Growth Regulator, Pyriproxyfen, to Larval Habitats. J. Am. Mosq. Control. Assoc. 1994, 10 (3), 344-347.