Malaria affects 263 million people annually. The Plasmodium parasite must navigate from a mosquito’s gut to its salivary glands to infect humans. Researchers disrupted this journey by altering one amino acid in the mosquito's genome, enabling high resistance to malaria spread. This gene modification could be propagated throughout mosquito populations using gene drives, which facilitate inheritance of specific mutations. Future efforts involve engineering and releasing these modified mosquitoes into the wild to reduce malaria transmission significantly over time.
Each year, 263 million people get malaria. But from the parasite's perspective, infecting humans is harder than you might think, and requires completing an epic journey within the tiny body of a mosquito. The change effectively rendered laboratory mosquitoes highly resistant to spreading malaria, researchers report Wednesday in Nature.
The idea that you could change just one amino acid and not have the parasite transmitted is a pretty big deal. It's really exciting.
Gene drives are sequences of DNA that can be inserted into the genome of an individual and cause a specific mutation or gene to be passed on to virtually all offspring, instead of just 50%.
These mosquitoes will spread on their own and gradually transform the malaria-transmitting mosquito population to one that cannot transmit malaria.
Collection
[
|
...
]