Can beets beat mosquitoes?

Abstract

If you’ve smelled the musty odor of moist soil or the air after a rainstorm, you’ve smelled geosmin, a terpene produced by soil bacteria and cyanobacteria (blue-green algae). Although scientists don’t know why humans have developed such a sensitivity for the scent, it seems some insects can also detect it. In Sweden, the US, and Brazil, researchers have now found that the yellow-fever mosquito Aedes aegypti is attracted to geosmin. The scientists demonstrated that the odorant could be useful in mosquito traps that help control the spread of disease (Curr. Biol. 2019, DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2019.11.002). In 2012, Marcus C. Stensmyr of Lund University was part of a group that found that the common fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster sniffs out and avoids geosmin because the compound is produced by molds that make fruit unsuitable feeding and breeding sites (Cell 2012, DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.09.046). Because of the group’s finding in fruit flies, Nadia Melo,