From Digital Trends
September 28, 2018
From creating malaria-resistant mosquitoes to building “photonic fences” able to shoot down the blood-sucking insects with deadly lasers, there are a whole lot of exciting, cutting-edge ways that science is trying to deal with the mosquito problem. Researchers from the United Kingdom’s Imperial College London have developed a new, promising approach to add to the toolset: A “gene drive” which disseminates a genetic modification that stops female mosquitoes from reproducing.
“If this genetic modification can have the ability to incapacitate the female mosquito’s ability to reproduce it could be an incredibly powerful tool to suppress the mosquito population which transmits diseases, such as malaria, Zika, yellow fever, and so on,” Andrea Crisanti, professor of Molecular Parasitology at Imperial, told Digital Trends.
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