A study of 119 human volunteers has found that three disease-spreading mosquito species are attracted to different people, suggesting that bite risk depends not only on human scent but on which mosquito species is doing the sensing.
The Florida International University-led study compared attraction patterns in Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, and Culex quinquefasciatus, mosquitoes associated with the spread of diseases including dengue, Zika, yellow fever, and West Nile virus. Rather than identifying a universal “mosquito magnet,” each species favored a different subset of volunteers.
“We didn’t expect the species to prefer different people when we started the study,” said lead author Kaylee Marrero in FIU’s press release. “Each species having a distinct microbial signature that they use as a cue was so surprising to me.”
To link mosquito preference with chemical and microbial signatures, the team combined behavioral testing in a uniport olfactometer with volatile and microbiome profiling. Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus were tested against participants’ arms, while night-feeding Culex quinquefasciatus was tested using participant-worn nylon sleeves. The researchers also collected dynamic headspace samples from participants’ arms for gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) and used full-length 16S sequencing to profile skin bacteria.
The behavioral tests showed that no participant was highly attractive to all three species. Attraction patterns were only weakly correlated between Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus, and showed little correlation between either Aedes species and Culex quinquefasciatus.
Those species-specific preferences were reflected in the chemical data. High attraction for Aedes aegypti and Culex quinquefasciatus was associated largely with lower abundance of certain volatile compounds, while Aedes albopictus attraction was associated with the presence of specific odor cues, including ketones and plant-like volatile compounds.
Microbial patterns also varied by species. The team detected 246 bacterial taxa across the participants, with only one shared by all individuals. Skin bacterial signatures differed between high- and low-attraction groups, and the taxa associated with attraction were not the same across mosquito species.
A separate analysis found that Aedes aegypti was slightly more attracted to male than female participants, a difference not observed for the other two species. The authors caution that further work will be needed to determine which odor or microbiome features are driving that effect.
“Isolating the components of human odor that attract or repel mosquitoes could lead to novel strategies to combat vector-borne diseases,” said Matthew DeGennaro, who leads the research team and directs FIU’s Biomolecular Sciences Institute.
The study moves mosquito attraction beyond the idea of a single “mosquito magnet” profile. Instead, it points to species-specific chemical and microbial cues that could be tested as targets for repellents, attractants, or surveillance tools matched to the mosquitoes driving local disease risk.
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