  We show that the single, non-photonic electron nuclear modification factor
$R_{AA}^e$ is affected by the thermal enhancement of the heavy-baryon to
heavy-meson ratio in relativistic heavy-ion collisions with respect to
proton-proton collisions. We make use of the dynamical quark recombination
model to compute such ratio and show that this produces a sizable suppression
factor for $R_{AA}^e$ at intermediate transverse momenta. We argue that such
suppression factor needs to be considered, in addition to the energy loss
contribution, in calculations of $R_{AA}^e$
