Experts from the laboratory in the Italian city of Terni have edited the genes of mosquitoes in order to save the lives of millions of people. Using CRISPR technology, they found a way to alter the genes of female mosquitoes to make them sterile.
Such females will not be able to lay eggs, and will not yet be able to bite humans.
All this is proposed to be done to combat malaria, from which in 2015 alone, almost 430 thousand people died worldwide, and another 212 million were infected, but they managed to survive. In addition to malaria, mosquitoes carry dengue and Zika virus. Most of all from mosquitoes suffer the population of Africa.
According to Italian scientists, gene editing not only sterilizes the female, but makes her look like a male, that is, she becomes a kind of hermaphrodite.
Because of this, the female's mouth size decreases and she can no longer bite and drink blood from a person, introducing an infection into his body.
The head of the research group, Ruth Müller, says the method is very simple, and using CRISPR, one section of the gene is simply excised (paranormal-news.ru).
On male mosquitoes, this will work in such a way that it will transmit the edited piece of DNA to its offspring. As a result, everything will boil down to the fact that after several generations a group of mosquitoes will not be able to bite anyone and will not be able to reproduce.
Promotional video:
The girl sells mosquito nets.
The biological laboratory in Terni is secret and closed, so who knows what else is being invented besides genetically edited mosquitoes.
And this innovation, immediately after the publication in the press, received many angry responses from animal activists and environmentalists. After all, no one knows how such an intervention in nature will be reflected.
In response to these protests, Dr. Müller says that it will not harm the environment, as only one specific species out of hundreds of mosquito species will be affected.
However, experts still consider this experiment dangerous and dubious. Therefore, at the moment, the entire population of mosquitoes with altered DNA is safely stored in the laboratory and it is not known when it will be released into nature and whether it will be released at all.
