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Skin microbiome alters attractiveness to Anopheles mosquitoes

Showering, Alicia, Martinez, Julien, Benavente, Ernest Diez, Gezan, Salvador A., Jones, Robert T., Oke, Catherine, Tytheridge, Scott, Pretorius, Elizabeth, Scott, Darren, Allen, Rachel L., D'Alessandro, Umberto, Lindsay, Steve W., Armour, John A. L., Pickett, John ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1008-6595 and Logan, James G. 2022. Skin microbiome alters attractiveness to Anopheles mosquitoes. BMC Microbiology 22 , 98. 10.1186/s12866-022-02502-4

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Abstract

Background Some people produce specific body odours that make them more attractive than others to mosquitoes, and consequently are at higher risk of contracting vector-borne diseases. The skin microbiome can break down carbohydrates, fatty acids and peptides on the skin into volatiles that mosquitoes can differentiate. Results Here, we examined how skin microbiome composition of women differs in relation to level of attractiveness to Anopheles coluzzii mosquitoes, to identify volatiles in body odour and metabolic pathways associated with individuals that tend to be poorly-attractive to mosquitoes. We used behavioural assays to measure attractiveness of participants to An. coluzzii mosquitoes, 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing of the bacteria sampled from the skin and gas chromatography of volatiles in body odour. We found differences in skin microbiome composition between the poorly- and highly-attractive groups, particularly eight Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) belonging to the Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria and Firmicutes phyla. Staphylococcus 2 ASVs are four times as abundant in the highly-attractive compared to poorly-attractive group. Associations were found between these ASVs and volatiles known to be attractive to Anopheles mosquitoes. Propanoic pathways are enriched in the poorly-attractive participants compared to those found to be highly-attractive. Conclusions Our findings suggest that variation in attractiveness of people to mosquitoes is related to the composition of the skin microbiota, knowledge that could improve odour-baited traps or other next generation vector control tools.

Item Type: Article
Date Type: Published Online
Status: Published
Schools: Chemistry
Additional Information: This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
Publisher: BioMed Central
ISSN: 1471-2180
Funders: MRC and the European Union�s Horizon 2020
Date of First Compliant Deposit: 4 May 2022
Date of Acceptance: 21 March 2022
Last Modified: 22 May 2023 21:59
URI: https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/149507

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