Scientist 'creates' sterile mosquito

(ANSA) - Milan, December 7 - 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.