When it comes to choosing a meal, mosquitoes may see some people as a bland bowl of whole grain cereal, while a select number of unlucky folks stand out like a giant, cheese-oozing pizza. The difference is in how you smell: Certain body odors are just more attractive to a mosquito on the prowl. But new research, published in PLOS ONE, suggests that your likelihood of getting bitten by a mosquito could be yet another thing you can blame on your parents: Your attractiveness to mosquitoes might be genetic.
To determine whether mosquito attraction might have a genetic component, researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine studied the appeal of 18 identical and 19 fraternal twins
via Mental Floss
Image: Fernández-Grandon et al., PLOS ONE