Why certain individuals are mosquito magnets
It is hard to conceal yourself from a female mosquito, as she will track your CO2 exhalations, body heat, and body odor to find you. However, some of us are distinct "mosquito magnets" who receive a disproportionate number of bites. Blood type, blood sugar level, consuming garlic or bananas, being a lady or a child, and being a favourite snack are prominent hypotheses. Leslie Vosshall, director of Rockefeller's Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, asserts that there is scant evidence for the majority of them.
SPECIAL HEALTH REPORT | BAZZUP | It is hard to conceal yourself from a female mosquito, as she will track your CO2 exhalations, body heat, and body odor to find you. However, some of us are distinct “mosquito magnets” who receive a disproportionate number of bites. Blood type, blood sugar level, consuming garlic or bananas, being a lady or a child, and being a favourite snack are prominent hypotheses. Leslie Vosshall, director of Rockefeller’s Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior, asserts that there is scant evidence for the majority of them.
This is why Vosshall and Maria Elena De Obaldia, a former postdoc in her group, set out to investigate the leading explanation to explain differences in mosquito attraction: individual odor variations associated with skin microbiota. Recent research has showed that fatty acids originating from the skin may produce a potent scent that mosquitoes cannot resist. Their findings were published in Cell.
Vosshall, the Robin Chemers Neustein Professor at The Rockefeller University and Chief Scientific Officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, explains, “There’s a very, very strong correlation between having high levels of these fatty acids on your skin and being a mosquito magnet.”
A competition that nobody desires to win
In the three-year trial, eight volunteers wore nylon stockings over their forearms for six hours per day. They placed Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes, the predominant vector species for Zika, dengue, yellow fever, and chikungunya, in the main room and examined the mosquitoes as they flew down the tubes towards one nylon or the other.
Subject 33 was by far the most enticing target for Aedes aegypti, since he was four times more tempting to the mosquitoes than the next most appealing research participant and an astounding 100 times more appealing than Subject 19.
De Obaldia states, “It would be evident within a few seconds of initiating the test.” “This is the sort of stuff that genuinely excites me as a scientist. This is an actual fact. This is not a matter of nitpicking. This has a massive impact.”
They noticed that mosquito magnets produced much more carboxylic acids than less attractive participants. These chemicals are present in sebum and are utilized by microorganisms on our skin to create our distinctive body odor.
To validate their findings, Vosshall’s team recruited 56 additional participants. Again, Subject 33 was the most appealing, and this remained true over time.
Even defeats find us.
Humans produce primarily two types of scents, which are detected by mosquitoes using two distinct sets of odor receptors: Orco and IR receptors. To determine whether it was possible to make mosquitoes incapable of detecting people, researchers developed mutants lacking one or both of the receptors. Orco mutants remained attracted to humans and able to differentiate between mosquito magnets and low attractors, but IR mutants gradually lost their attraction to humans but preserved the ability to locate us.
These outcomes were not what the scientists had hoped for. “The goal was to create a mosquito that had no attraction to humans, or one that had a weakened attraction to everyone and could not distinguish between Subject 19 and Subject 33. It could lead to the creation of more effective insect repellents, according to Vosshall, so that would be fantastic. “Yet, that was not what we observed. It was difficult.”
The seeming invulnerability of the mosquito smell tracker makes it impossible to imagine a world in which we are not the main course. However, manipulation of our skin’s microbiome is a viable path. It is likely that slathering the skin of a high-appeal individual, such as Subject 33, with sebum and skin germs from a low-appeal individual, such as Subject 19, could have a mosquito-masking effect.
Vosshall observes that this experiment has not been conducted. “That is a difficult experiment. But if this were true, one could imagine that a nutritional or microbiome intervention in which bacteria that can alter how they interact with sebum are applied to the skin may transform a subject like Subject 33 into Subject 19. However, this is purely speculation.”
She and her colleagues hope that this paper may encourage researchers to investigate other mosquito species, particularly those in the malaria-carrying Anopheles genus, notes Vosshall: I believe it would be quite amazing to determine if this is a universal impact.
