Scientists have made mosquitoes that won’t carry malaria

According to the research, the gene was successfully passed on to 99.5% of the mosquito’s offspring across three generations, making them equally resistant.

“Should it prove to be translatable to field studies and should the effector gene being used prove to significantly reduce the capacity of the mosquito to carry the malaria vector, then it is quite possible that this technology would become an important tool in the control of malaria”, Atkinson said.

In research published recently in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, US researchers inserted a “resistance” gene into the mosquito’s DNA with an editing technique called the Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats, or CRISPR, according to the BBC News.

Nearly 100 percent of offspring – 99.5 percent – exhibited this trait, proving that the genetic tweak worked. “The mosquitoes we created are not the final brand, but we know this technology allows us to efficiently create large populations”. Mosquitoes pick up the parasite by biting an infected person, and spread it when they bite someone else.

The gene editing technique was developed in collaboration with Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz, biologists from the University of California San Diego, who developed a method that allows a genetic mutation to be transmitted through the germ line of fruit flies with a 95 percent inheritance rate.

Scientists have discovered a new way of fighting malaria, a disease that continues to kill half a million people every year despite so many prevention tactics.

Scientists at the University of California hope the GM insects will eventually be able to pass on their “immunity” to mosquitoes in the wild.

Dr Anthony James and his team showed that they could give the insect new DNA code to make it a poor host for the malaria parasite.

Malaria is one of the world’s leading health problems.

“Gene drives work by manipulating the laws of genetics so that the desired genes are copied onto both of an offspring’s chromosomes when a mutant mates with a wild mosquito”, Sarah Kaplan, of The Washington Post, reported. The team used a technique known as CRISPR-Cas9. To measure, they tacked on a fluorescence gene that made mosquitoes’ eyes look red if they harbored the new gene.

The centre says about 3.4 billion people live in areas where they are at risk of contracting the disease, but children, babies, and pregnant women – mostly in Africa – are the most likely to die from it.