On Oct. 13, 2020, Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator Leslie Vosshall’s team at The Rockefeller University and colleagues reported that Female mosquitoes have a sense of taste that is specially tuned to detect a combination of at least four different substances in blood. The study was published in the journal Neuron.

The team genetically modified mosquitoes so that researchers could see which neurons fire when a mosquito tastes blood.