Genetically modified mosquitoes engineered to resist infection could eventually save millions of lives through the eradication of malaria.
Scientists in America have created a species of mosquito that is resistant to malaria. That resistance would likely result in it dominating any area in which it was released – eventually driving malaria-carrying species to extinction.
Malaria currently kills up to 3 million people per year around the world, most of them small children in Africa.
Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena and colleagues at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, who have released details of their recent research, are not the first team to create genetically modified mosquitoes.
The breakthrough with their research is that their mosquitoes appear to be superior to their wild counterparts.
The transgenic mosquitoes were more fertile and less likely to die than normal, wild mosquitoes, they report in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
They also began to outbreed the normal mosquitoes.
“To our knowledge, no one has previously reported a demonstration that transgenic mosquitoes can exhibit a fitness advantage over nontransgenics,” the researchers wrote.
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