An Italian researcher has
managed to generate sterile mosquitoes that are unable to
produce eggs in an important step towards arresting the spread
of malaria, it emerged Monday.
Andrea Crisanti of Imperial College London made the
breakthrough by combining two frontier molecular technologies:
the genome editing tool Crispr, which he used to introduce the
sterility gene, and the molecular turbo 'gene drive', which was
employed to spread it among large numbers of the insect.
"By combining these technologies for the first time we are
able to modify a species by intervening in the processes that
regulate its evolution," Crisanti said.
"By attacking the reproductive genes we can induce a
drastic reduction in population, leading almost to extinction:
this is useful for malaria-carrying mosquitoes, but in future it
could also be applied to other harmful and infesting plant and
animal species to restore the balance of an ecosystem," he
continued.
The first experiment, published in Nature Biotechnology,
was conducted on the Anopheles Gambiae mosquito, the main vector
of malaria in sub-Saharan Africa.
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