To avoid mosquito bites: Wear light clothes, drain standing water and eliminate two out of five light receptors in the mosquitoes’ eyes with some CRSPR/Cas-9 gene editing.

A new paper out of UC Santa Barbara has shown that inactivating the Opsin1 (Op1) and Opsin2 (Op2) receptors disrupts the ability of the mosquito Aedes aegypti to recognize dark targets, which mosquitoes will explore to determine if they are hosts. The findings, published in the journal Current Biology(link is external), are the first to decipher aspects of how mosquitoes use vision to find targets following carbon dioxide stimulation.