If you live in a city, the word "bedbug" is like an icy dagger to the heart. The blood-suckers rely on humans to survive, and they're great at hopping from one apartment (or person) to another. They're also increasingly resistant to insecticides.

But don't pledge fealty to our mattress-dwelling overlords just yet: In a pair of papers published Tuesday in Nature Communications, two teams of researchers report the first ever complete genome sequencing for the pest.

Sequencing an organism's genome – figuring out what genes it has and where they all go – makes studying it much, much easier. This information allows scientists to figure out what particular genes do, how they work together and how they might be related to genes found in other organisms.

Until recently, DNA sequencing was slow and expensive enough to limit its use in the lab. These days it's just a question of which creature a researcher wants to tackle next. That's why so many genomic finds are published in pairs: When labs around the world all have the ability to investigate any genome they think might be useful, a few are bound to end up working on the same project simultaneously.

A feeding bedbug. (Louis Sorkin) A feeding bedbug. (Louis Sorkin)

The interest in bedbugs is pretty obvious: The common bedbug (Cimex lectularius) has been feeding off of humans for most (if not all) of our species's history. They cause pain in the form of welts and rashes, but they also cause emotional anguish – especially in cities, where many may worry that playing host to the bugs will make them patient zero for an embarrassing epidemic. The insects can be nearly impossible to get rid of (especially if they can simply slip to the apartment next door and come back when you're done cleaning like mad) and recent studies have painted a dire picture for insecticide use: In one published last week, scientists found that killing recently collected bedbugs required over 30,000 times more insecticide than was needed to kill bugs that had been bred in the lab for 30 years.

But if scientists can figure out what makes a bedbug bite, they might be able to stop it from doing so.

"At this time, there is no “silver bullet” for impacting a specific gene to control bed bug potentials," The University of Cincinnati's Joshua Benoit, corresponding author on one of the two papers, told The Post. But, he added, "the presence of a nearly complete genome will make identifying potential targets much easier."

"Work on bedbugs previous to this was like feeling your way in the dark," said George Amato, director of the American Museum of Natural History's Sackler Institute for Comparative Genomics and an author on the second paper. "By providing this genome – it’s like turning a light on. Now researchers know better how to explore."

Amato and his AMNH colleagues (along with researchers from Weill Cornell Medicine) were interested in the bedbug's status as a "living fossil". That's a term that gets misused a lot – contrary to popular belief, it doesn't actually mean that an organism hasn't changed at all in thousands or millions of years. Every organism continues to evolve over time. But when it comes to living fossils, that evolution results in surprisingly few outward signs of change.