Author: Tina Hesman Saey / Source: Science News for Students
Gene editing may push a species of malaria-carrying mosquito to extinction.
These new results come from a small-scale laboratory study. Researchers used a genetic engineering tool to make changes to species called Anopheles gambiae (Ah-NOF-eh-lees GAM-bee-aye). As a result, the mosquitoes stopped producing offspring in eight to 12 generations. The researchers reported this September 24 in Nature Biotechnology. If the finding holds up in larger studies, this tool could be the first capable of wiping out a disease-carrying mosquito species.
“This is a great day,” says James Bull. He’s an evolutionary biologist at the University of Texas at Austin. He was not involved in the study. “Here we are with a technology that could radically change public health for the whole world.” That’s because A. gambiae is the main mosquito spreading malaria in Africa. The disease kills more than 400,000 people each year worldwide, according to the World Health Organization. Many of those who die are children.
The researchers changed the mosquitoes’ genes with a gene drive. Gene drives use the molecular “scissors” known as CRISPR/Cas9 to copy and paste themselves into an organism’s DNA at precise locations. They’re designed to break the rules of inheritance. They can quickly spread a genetic tweak to all offspring.
The new gene drive breaks a mosquito gene called doublesex. Female mosquitoes that inherit two copies of the broken gene develop like males. They are unable to bite or lay eggs. Being unable to bite means they can’t spread the malaria parasite. Males and females that inherit only one copy of the disrupted gene develop normally and are fertile. Males don’t bite, whether they have the gene drive or not.
Female Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes’ development was altered by a gene drive that disrupts the doublesex gene. Females that inherited two copies of the gene drive (bottom right) developed antenna (red arrow)…
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