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closeA suggested extension of this experiment
Posted by abhirupchaudhuri on 24 Apr 2015 at 18:34 GMT
Female mosquitoes are attracted to certain chemicals. Identical twins with similar genetic makeup is expected to produce similar amounts of these "attractive chemicals". For example, people with high concentration of steroids on their skins are very attractive. CO2 and uric acid are also known to be "mosquito magnets". Unfortunately, with the same diet, similar levels of activity and similar stress levels identical twins will produce these chemicals in similar quantities. So in my view the experiment could have been more interesting if the twins were put through different diet and the results were then compared, or may be, one of the twins goes through an intense work out before the experiment and see if the correlation is disturbed.
Another way is to use air laden with trace amounts of CO2 or uric acid or any other known "mosquito magnet" in one of the Y tube arms instead of filtered air. The Y tube arms are of course occupied by our identical twins.
RE: A suggested extension of this experiment
Mandela replied to abhirupchaudhuri on 26 Apr 2015 at 08:45 GMT
Thank you for your suggestion, however we were specifically interested in looking at the heritable component without these additional factors in play. Like you mention, it is known that some of these compounds are attractive to mosquitoes and studies using y-tubes have also shown this to be the case. If we added these variables we would expect to see differences e.g. more CO2, more exercise will make that individual more attractive, however, we would learn anything that cannot be found in existing literature. Your example could be an interesting later experiment to test how we can disrupt the balance because even compounds identified as attractive often, at some point, become repellent but we require a very thorough knowledge of the individuals tested and the relationship of their genes to their odour before we could glean useful information from this. Thank you again for your time and suggestion.