This is Scientific American's 60 Second Science.

I'm Christopher Intagiyata.

As you've probably experienced firsthand, some mosquito species have a real taste for warm human blood. So much so that if you raise

them on it in the lab they'll accept no substitute. Fortunately I don't get

major reactions at all. Brad Maine is a mosquito geneticist at UC Davis and part-time mosquito meal provider.

So it's not too bad for me, but some people in the lab are itching pretty bad when they

have hundreds of mosquito bites on their arm.

Out in the wild, some species are less picky.

Takeanofly's Arabiensis, common in East Africa.

They'll feed on cattle, dogs, goats, pigs, people,

wherever they can find a warm meal.

But what Maine and his colleagues wanted to know was whether the bloodsucker's choice of

victim might be genetically determined.

So they sequenced the genomes of 48 arabyensis mosquitoes from Tanzania, which had fed on either humans or cows.

And they found that bugs with cow blood in their bellies had one partially rearranged chromosome, compared to those who'd snacked on human blood,

which could explain the preferences in meal choice.

The studies in the journal Ploss Genetics.

If that genetic switch really does make cows more attractive than we are to

mosquitoes, in theory we could genetically engineer them to steer clear of people and

their cow victims don't get human malaria.

It's a case of knowing your enemy and so the better we know these mosquitoes,

I think the more equipped we're going to be to be able to control them.

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