ENGINEERING MOSQUITOES’ GENES TO RESIST MALARIA
By Nicholas Wade Nov. 23, 2015
In a basement on the Irvine campus of the University of California, behind a series of five protective doors, two teams of biologists have created a novel breed of mosquito that they hope will help eradicate malaria form the world.
The mosquito has been engineered to carry two ingenious genetic modifications. One is a set of genes that spew out antibodies to the malarial parasite harbored by the mosquito. Mosquitoes with these genes are rendered resistant to the parasite and so cannot spread malaria.
The other modification is a set of genetic elements known as a gene drive that should propel the malariaresistance genes throughout a natural mosquito population. When a malaria-resistant mosquito mates with a wild female, the gene drive copies both itself and the resistance genes over from the male chromosome to its female counterpart.
Because almost all the progeny carry the new genes, instead of just 50 percent as would be expected by Mendel’s laws of genetics, the inserted genes are expected to spread rapidly and take over a wild population ∈ as few as 10 generations, or a single season. A large region, at least ∈ principle, could be freed from malaria, which kills almost 600,000 people a year.
(…) Two teams came together after Dr. Gantz and Dr. Bier developed a gene drive for the Drosophila fruit fly, a standard laboratory organism, to help identify genetically mutant insects. Finding their new gene drive was far more efficient than expected, driving its cargo genes into almost all the fruit fly progeny, the researchers realized they had created not just a handy laboratory tool but a powerful technique for spreading favored genes through wild populations. (…)
Disponível em: http://w w w .nytimes.com/2015/11/24/science/genedrive-mosquitoes-malaria.html. Acesso em nov. 2018.
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