We Are One Step Closer to Destroying Bedbugs Forever

In an all-too-rare win for humanity, a team of researchers from the American Museum of Natural History and Weill Cornell Medicine have sequenced the bedbug genome. It is the first step, they say, in finding the chinks in the armor of these little, sneaky bloodsuckers, and insecticide-ing them into eternity.

Bedbugs are miraculously hardy little beings, says Chris Mason, a geneticist at Weill Cornell and senior author on the research published this week in the journal Nature Communications. They’ve gone pretty unchanged for thousands of years or so, making them what scientists sometimes call “living fossils” (though researchers don’t quite have enough ancient bedbug DNA to confirm the moniker, Mason says). And as the research demonstrated, bedbugs have developed an unusually strong resistance to modern pesticides. “This makes the control of bedbugs extremely labor intensive,” the AMNH invertebrate specialist Louis Sorkin said in the understatement of this fresh, new year.