{"id":3322,"date":"2018-11-01T11:15:13","date_gmt":"2018-11-01T01:15:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ppmmagazine.com.au\/?p=3322"},"modified":"2022-11-04T16:13:18","modified_gmt":"2022-11-04T06:13:18","slug":"manipulating-mosquitos-to-self-destruct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/pest-control-mosquitoes\/manipulating-mosquitos-to-self-destruct\/","title":{"rendered":"MANIPULATING MOSQUITOS TO SELF-DESTRUCT"},"content":{"rendered":"

The latest efforts in the war against mosquitoes seek to turn them against themselves by manipulating their genetic makeup.<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Fifteen years ago, scientists in London hatched an out-there plan. Their aim? Eradicate pesticide-resistant mosquitoes that were killing half a million people a year by spreading malaria. The plan? Well, it was nothing short\u00a0of crazy.<\/p>\n

Biologists Austin<\/strong> Burt<\/strong> and Andrea Crisanti<\/strong>, from London\u2019s Imperial College, proposed planting a deadly gene in mosquito DNA and engineering it so it would spread through each generation faster than nature intended and ultimately crash an entire population with just a few infected Trojan mosquitoes.<\/p>\n

This \u2018gene drive\u2019 concept was decades-old but was yet to find success. That is until now. Using Crispr (if you\u2019re asking, ‘What\u2019s Crispr?’ the short answer is that it\u2019s a revolutionary new class of molecular tools that scientists can use to precisely target and cut any kind of genetic material), Burt and Crisanti\u2019s team have wiped out caged cohorts of the malaria-touting mosquito Anopheles gambiae<\/em> in as few as seven generations.<\/p>\n

Dr Crisanti\u2019s team disrupted the double-sex gene in a way that affects only females. These females develop ambiguous sexual features: they cannot bite because they have male-type mouthparts, and they are infertile. But the males are unaffected and continue spreading the disruptive gene until no more eggs are laid.<\/p>\n

The results, published last month in Nature Biotechnology, represent the first-ever annihilation of a population of animals via gene drive, and moves scientists a step closer to eradicating mosquitoes and the deadly diseases they carry, including malaria (Plasmodium falciparum<\/em>, inside blood cells, pictured above).\u00a0Using this method, computer modelling predicts that wild populations could be made to crash in about four years.<\/p>\n

Crisanti and his team, whose work is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, formally teamed up with partner institutions in 2011 in Burkina Faso, Uganda, and Mali to establish local insectaries and field sites to one day test a malaria-eradicating gene drive in the wild. If all goes well, the Gates-backed project, called Target Malaria, could field test Imperial College\u2019s Crispr\u2019d mosquitoes as early as 2024.<\/p>\n

Genetically engineered insects have been released\u00a0into the environment before but the question of how\u00a0to regulate gene drives is still an open one. There are obvious concerns about controlling any release and being fully aware of any knock-on effects. Target Malaria is aware of these limitations and isn\u2019t jumping straight into testing gene drives. To gain the trust of local communities and demonstrate to regulators they can track genetically modified mosquitoes in the wild, they have just released 10,000 sterile male mosquitoes in a small controlled trial in Burkina Faso.<\/p>\n

If the sterile male experiments go well, they\u2019ll step up to something called an ‘X-shredder’, a genetically engineered mosquito that produces almost entirely male offspring. After a few months, the modification will eventually peter out of the population. It still won\u2019t be an effective malaria eradication strategy, but it will give regulators more data to go on before considering a full-blown gene drive.<\/p>\n

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Reworked extract from: \u2018Here\u2019s The Plan To End Malaria With Crispr-Edited Mosquitoes\u2019 by Andrew Hammond, Wired.Com, 29 September 2018, and \u2018Giving Malaria a Deadline\u2019, by Nicholas Wade, The New York Times, 24 September, 2018.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The latest efforts in the war against mosquitoes seek to turn them against themselves by manipulating their genetic makeup.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":3563,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"The latest efforts in the war against mosquitoes seek to turn them against themselves by manipulating their genetic makeup.\u00a0","_seopress_robots_index":"yes","_gspb_post_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[359],"tags":[],"company":[],"pest":[157],"pesticide":[],"product-service":[],"class_list":["post-3322","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-pest-control-mosquitoes","pest-mosquitoes","wpbf-post"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3322"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3322\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3563"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3322"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"company","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/company?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"pest","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pest?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"pesticide","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pesticide?post=3322"},{"taxonomy":"product-service","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/professionalpestmanager.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product-service?post=3322"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}