The smell that attracts mosquitoes the most among human body odors turned out

Anyone who’s spent a summer night brushing away mosquitoes or a summer day scratching a mosquito bite would agree. “Mosquitoes stink”. However, human-generated odors are an important factor in attracting mosquitoes. Related video above: Do You Attract Mosquitoes? Check Your Soap In a science report released on Friday, scientists built an ice rink-sized test field and infused it with the scents of different people By doing so, we helped identify the different chemicals in the body odors that attract these insects. Mosquitoes are related to flies and mostly feed on nectar from flowers. However, females preparing to lay eggs need a diet that contains extra protein, namely blood. At worst, the bite leaves only an itchy red bump. However, mosquito bites are often fatal due to insect-borne parasites and viruses. One of the most dangerous of these diseases is malaria. Malaria is a blood-borne disease caused by microscopic parasites that live in red blood cells. When a mosquito bites a person infected with malaria, the parasite is inhaled along with the blood. Dr. Connor McMeniman, an assistant professor of molecular microbiology, said that after the parasite develops in the mosquito’s stomach, it “migrates to the salivary glands and is expelled onto the skin of another human host when the mosquito feeds again.” Stated. The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the Johns Hopkins Malaria Institute in Baltimore research immunology and immunology. Malaria has been eradicated in the United States over the past century, thanks to window screens, air conditioning, and improved drainage systems that allow the aquatic mosquito larvae to enter. “Malaria still kills more than 600,000 people a year, mostly in children under five and pregnant women,” said McMeniman, the book’s lead author. The new study was published in the journal Current Biology. “Malaria causes a lot of suffering around the world, and part of the motivation for this study was to really try to understand how malaria-carrying mosquitoes find humans. McMeniman and Bloomberg postdoctoral researchers and the study’s lead authors, Drs. Diego Giraldo and Stephanie Rankin Turner, focused on the Gambian anopheles mosquito, a species of mosquito found in sub-Saharan Africa. rice field. They partnered with Zambia’s Macha Research Trust, led by Scientific Director Dr. Edgar Simrundu. “We were very ambitious to develop a system that would allow us to study the behavior of African malarial mosquitoes in naturalistic habitats that mirror their homeland in Africa,” said McMeniman. rice field. The researchers also compared the odor preferences of various human mosquitoes, observing the insects’ ability to track odors over a distance of 66 feet (20 meters), and were most active between 10pm and 2am. I wanted to study mosquitoes during a certain period of time. Using all these boxes, the researchers created a shielded facility the size of a skating rink. The perimeter of the facility was dotted with six screened tents in which study participants slept. Air from the tents, which carried the participants’ unique breath and body odor scents, was channeled through long tubes to absorbent pads in the main facility, where it was heated and carbon dioxide-fed to mimic a sleeping human. In the -20 meter facility, a buffet of sleeping subjects’ scents was served. Infrared cameras tracked mosquito movements to different samples. (The mosquitoes used in the study were not malaria-infected and could not reach sleeping humans.) The researchers found that many people who went on picnics testified: People attract more mosquitoes than others. In addition, chemical analysis of air from tents revealed the odor-causing agents behind mosquito attraction, or lack thereof. Mosquitoes are most attracted to airborne carboxylic acids such as butyric acid. Butyric acid is a compound found in “smelly” cheeses such as cheese. Limberger. These carboxylic acids are produced by bacteria on human skin and tend to go unnoticed by us. While carboxylic acids attract mosquitoes, insects appear to be deterred by another chemical found in plants called eucalyptol. The researchers suspected that samples containing high levels of eucalyptol were related to the diet of one of the participants. Simrundu said it was “very interesting” to find a correlation between the chemicals in different people’s body odors and the attraction of mosquitoes to those scents. “This discovery opens up an approach to developing lures and repellents that can be used in traps to disrupt host-seeking behavior in mosquitoes, thereby potentially controlling malaria vectors in areas where malaria is endemic.” Co-author Simrundu said. of research. Dr. Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist not involved in the study and vice president and chief scientific officer of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was equally enthusiastic. “I think this is a very interesting study,” she said. “It’s the first time an experiment of this kind has been done outside a laboratory on this scale.” Professor Vosshall studies other mosquito species that spread dengue, Zika and chikungunya. In her study published last year in Cytology, she and her colleagues found that this mosquito species also seeks out carboxylic acid scents produced by bacteria on human skin. The fact that these two different species respond to similar chemical cues is a good thing, she said. This is because it may make it easier to make repellents and traps for mosquitoes in general. This study may not have immediate implications for avoiding insect bites. next barbecue. (Vosshall said scrubbing with unscented soap doesn’t get rid of the natural scents that attract mosquitoes.) But the new paper says, “What mosquitoes use to hunt us? And it gives us very good clues as to what we understand.” It is essential as we think about our next steps. ”