Imagine a world without blood-sucking mosquitos! So no itching red spots on your skin anymore and the global spread of mosquito-borne viruses such as Malaria, Zirka and dengue fever would be stopped. Before you start to discuss that there are e.g. birds which depend on mosquito as their favorite meal, allow me to clarify: I don't talk about killing the mosquito, I am talking about to transform it to a non-biting, friendly insect, which cannot harm us. I read an interesting commentary from Peter A. Armbruster (PNAS, 2018) which deals with the paper from Bradshaw et al. (PNASm 2017) in which they analyze which genes make the difference between biting an non-biting mosquito. Fun fact: There are already non-biting mosquito species in nature, and they evolved from biting ancestors multiple times independently. Non-biting can be an evolutionary benefit because even if blood provides energy and nutrition, it also comes with some costs: you need to spend energy on finding a host and you have to survive the feeding. Moreover, blood-feeding can elicit a protective heat-shock response and produces toxic by-products that must be taken care of. So no wonder that some mosquito species prefer not to bite. They build on resources which they collected in their larval state. So back to the work from Bradshaw et al. : They analyzed which genes make the difference between biting and non-biting mosquito. For that, they used W. smithii which is the only known mosquito species in which some populations are biting while other geographically disparate and genetically distinct populations are non-biters. Artificial selection experiments and comparing individuals from both populations show that there is indeed a pool of genes which seem to be different between biting and non-biting mosquito. Of course, they do not know yet the function of all the genes. But the idea of just manipulating the genetics of mosquito in order to reprogram them to non-biting species is scary amazing, isn't it?
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IdeaI love to increase my general science knowledge by reading papers from different fields of science. Here I share some of them. Archiv
März 2018
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