US and British researchers have genetically engineered a strain of flightless mosquito that may help curb the spread of Dengue fever, a flulike disease that is endemic to over 100 countries and affects tens of millions of people every year.
The researchers, from the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in the US, the University of Oxford and Oxitec Limited in the UK, wrote about their work in a paper published online on 22 February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, PNAS.
The idea is to introduce genetically altered males into the wild, they mate with wild females and the females of the next generation are rendered flightless. Males do not inherit the defect: they can fly as normal and show no ill effects from carrying the gene, said the researchers, but when they mate with females they pass on the gene.
The researchers wrote in their paper that they engineered "transgenic strains" of Aedes aegypti to have a "repressible female-specific flightless phenotype using either two separate transgenes or a single transgene, based on the use of a female-specific indirect flight muscle promoter from the Aedes aegypti Actin-4 gene".
The researchers estimated that if released, the new breed could sustainably suppress the wild mosquito population in six to nine months: "the strains are expected to facilitate area-wide control or elimination of dengue if adopted as part of an integrated pest management strategy", they wrote.
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