This was discovered by an American research team that has finally understood what is different about the people who are most targeted by mosquitoes.
A female mosquito Temples of the Egyptians while stinging a person / Rockefeller University
Some people are real magnets for mosquitoes and, as a result, they find themselves more often to deal with annoying bites and the itching that comes with it. But what really makes these people more attractive to mosquitoes has not yet been fully clarified, although the preferences of these insects have long been the subject of heated debate and popular beliefs. Genetics, blood type, sweet blood, and the consumption of garlic or bananas are all very popular theories on the subject. Yet, for most of these claims, there is actually little credible data. On the contrary, also in response to the growing spread of mosquitoes that transmit dangerous infectious diseases, the scientific community is investigating thoroughly why some people are more targeted by mosquitoes, starting with the main factors that attract them to us, such as the carbon dioxide (CO2) that we emit with our breath, body heat, the color of the clothes we wear, the characteristics of our skin and the different smells we emanate. New research, conducted by a team of scholars from Rockefeller University in New York, specifically suggests that some individual variations in skin odor could explain our different fascination with mosquitoes.
So mosquitoes choose who to bite
To show that skin odor makes some people more susceptible to mosquito bites than others, the American researchers conducted a three-year study, in which they asked subjects who most often reported mosquito bites to wear nylon stockings on their forearms. for six hours a day, for several days, in order to collect the smell of their skin. The same thing was asked of a group of “lucky ones” who were almost never bitten by mosquitoes, so that they could subsequently compare the smell of the most attractive people with those that were less so.
For this comparison, the scholars designed a two-choice olfactometric test, consisting of a plexiglass chamber divided into two tubes, each ending in a box that contained a sock. They then positioned mosquitos Temples of the Egyptians – the main vector species of viruses such as Zika, dengue, yellow fever and chikungunya – in the main chamber and observed the preferences of the insects as they flew along the tubes to one sock instead of another.
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The test showed that mosquitoes were particularly attracted to the sock worn by a specific person (the subject 33) and that this attraction has remained stable over time, confirmed by a subsequent test conducted years later. When the scholars then calculated to what extent subject 33 was more inviting than the others, they found that he was four times more attractive than the next study participant for whom mosquitoes had shown a greater predilection, and even 100 times more attractive than the least palatablesubject 19.
Mosquitoes only bite some people more
The researchers then classified the participants as more or less attractive subjects to mosquitoes, wondering what differentiated their odors, and used chemical analysis techniques to identify molecular compounds which were present in the skin odor of each.
These analyzes revealed that mosquitoes were present on the skin of the people who attracted most mosquitoes significantly higher levels of three carboxylic acids – entadecanoic, heptadecanoic and nonadecanoic – in addition to other compounds not identified but belonging to this same chemical class. “The specific mixture of these and other carboxylic acids varied between different highly attractive subjects – explained the researchers in the study just published in the journal Cell – . Therefore, there may be more than one way a person can be more attractive to mosquitoes”.
This insight into why mosquitoes bite some people more than others and, above all, the variations in the composition of carboxylic acids found on the skin of the most inviting subjects confirm the results of previous research also conducted by researchers at Rockefeller University, which revealed the complexity of the olfactory system of Temples of the Egyptians. This study showed that their olfactory neurons are responsible for the co-expression of multiple receptors, which could explain the ability of mosquitoes to smell our smell anyway, regardless of the precise mixture of different carboxylic acids.