Frequently asked questions

Turning insect behavior into training data to prevent disease and protect crops.

We are bringing together a scientific community around one question: what if we could change an insect’s decision to land?

When a mosquito lands on a human, it can mean malaria. When an insect lands on a crop, it can mean eating, egg-laying, and lost food.

Changing these decisions means understanding the living animal. Which compounds change its behavior? Under what conditions? And does that change translate into protection for people and crops?

Our tools are not keeping pace. Insects evolve faster than the insecticide industry can formulate. We need an approach built around changing their decision to land.

Changing trillions of those decisions is a technically more challenging approach. But answering it could be one of humanity’s most important achievements. We think this is one of the most important technical and moral challenges of our time.

We are living through rapid gains in machine intelligence, yet malaria is resurgent and insects continue to reduce global crop yields.

Taking advantage of those gains means removing a bottleneck to real-world progress: behavioral data. The opportunity is to bring increasingly capable models together with a scientific community committed to running the experiments those models need.

AI can read everything humanity has written about mosquitoes and other insects and still cannot know how an untested compound will change a decision of this living animal. We have to run the experiments.

We are building a standardized database capturing insect responses to thousands of chemical compounds. Those responses become training data for predictive models. Each experiment, whether a compound works or fails, adds evidence that helps us decide what to test next.

To accelerate the answer means more openness and rapid sharing. It means an effort with the ambition of the Human Genome Project, with thousands of scientists generating behavioral data that becomes training data for increasingly capable predictive models.

Laboratories bring different expertise, insect populations, and field conditions. Sharing their work allows each experiment to inform the next, across the network. We want a community of researchers pointed in the same direction, with the same intention, with the same mission.

mZero focuses on mosquito behavior and disease prevention. pZero focuses on agricultural insects and crop protection, beginning with spotted wing drosophila, Drosophila suzukii.

For both, a central question is how laboratory responses translate to performance in the field. We need to know whether a compound that changes behavior in an assay can reduce crop damage or disease transmission. Combining standardized behavioral data with field validation should make our models more effective at predicting which compounds are worth developing.

This requires an array of disciplines, from machine learning and computer vision to chemical ecology, insect biology, and insect neuroscience.

University laboratories, research institutes, and qualified independent researchers can contribute their assays, expertise, and field validation. Your group might screen compounds, investigate how they change behavior, test model predictions, or study their performance in the field. We would work together to define the experiments and the support needed to run them.

Every participating group receives the full shared dataset and ranked actives, including results from other laboratories. Shared materials include behavioral measurements, experimental metadata, and video recordings.

Accepted laboratories also receive compounds, standardized assay materials, and shared protocols. Data released through mZero and pZero is available under CC BY 4.0, so researchers can use it, cite it, and build on it with attribution.

We are also open to funding a student or postdoctoral researcher working on an agreed collaboration. That support is considered case by case.

Request access through mZero for mosquito research or pZero for agricultural insect research.

Tell us what your laboratory works on, the questions you want to answer, and how you think you could contribute. We will follow up to discuss the work and the support it would require.