Your skin chemistry may affect which mosquitoes most want to bite you
Some people seem to get eaten alive by mosquitoes each summer, while others sail through the season with nary a bite. Certain mosquito species are attracted to, or repelled by, different subsets of people depending on the components of their body chemistry and skin microbiome, researchers report July 30 in iScience. Understanding how mosquitoes choose their hosts could help prevent the spread of mosquito-borne illnesses, including dengue, West Nile and yellow fever. “We want to understand what people’s risks are for being bitten because all of these mosquitoes that we studied are vectors of disease,” says Matthew DeGennaro, a neurogeneticist at Florida International University in Miami. Manipulating the molecules and bacteria that influence attraction could help scientists create new kinds of commercial mosquito repellents, he says. Mosquitoes locate their dinners through visual, thermal and scent cues. But human scent is the product of more than a thousand chemicals, many of which are produced by bacteria that live on our skin. That makes it challenging to know which specific cues mosquitoes rely on to find their preferred human hosts. DeGennaro and colleagues recruited 119 volunteers and exposed three different species of mosquito to each person’s scent. For Aedes aegypti and Aedes...
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