The bedbug is an apple-seed sized blood-sucking insect that feeds on their hosts - humans - while they sleep. Grossed out? It gets worse. Once you've got bedbugs in your house, controlling the hitchhiking pest is notoriously difficult and expensive because pesticides just don't seem to knock these suckers out.
A team of Ohio State entomologists say they may have figured out why. A genetic study of the bugs' messenger RNA found the presence of enzymes that break down insecticides. OSU entomologist Susan Jones says when the team examined a group of bedbugs that had been reared in a lab for decades, they found they had low levels of these enzymes.
Susan Jones: But bugs that I had collected recently from Columbus, OH had very high levels of these detoxification agents, these enzymes. And so what this is telling us is that modern day bedbugs have evolved mechanisms to overcome insecticide treatments.
OSU scientists are hoping their research will help them figure out how to turn off these enzymes and thus make the bugs easier to kill. The study's authors also wrote that the bugs' ability to resist pesticides may be one factor for its dramatic resurgence.