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Biotech

Researchers Try Using CRISPR To Genetically Engineer Zika-Resistant Mosquitoes (cornell.edu) 31

Posted by EditorDavid from the GMOsquitos dept.
A new research study at the University of Missouri is using CRISPR gene-editing technology to produce mosquitoes that are unable to replicate Zika virus and therefore cannot infect a human through biting. Slashdot reader wooloohoo shared an announcement from Cornell's Alliance for Science: Alexander Franz, an associate professor in the MU College of Veterinary Medicine, collaborated with researchers at Colorado State University... Their work was recently published in the journal Viruses. Franz added that the genetic modification is inheritable, so future generations of the altered mosquitoes would be resistant to Zika virus as well... "[W]e are simply trying to expand the toolbox and provide a solution by genetically modifying the mosquitoes to become Zika-resistant while keeping them alive at the same time."

Franz' research is designed to help prevent another outbreak of Zika virus disease from occurring while also addressing concerns that have some have raised about reducing populations of mosquitoes, which are a food source for some animals...

The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health.
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Researchers Try Using CRISPR To Genetically Engineer Zika-Resistant Mosquitoes More

Researchers Try Using CRISPR To Genetically Engineer Zika-Resistant Mosquitoes

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  • Can't they just modify them to be homicidal (insecticidal?) vs. the other sex, so that they kill each other?

    • Sure! Just lift the virus that apparently infected Americans from them, and adapt it to mosquitoes! ;)

      You know you are literally condoning genocide out if laziness, right? What's next? Shoot covid-carrying bipeds? Because a vaccine is a bit harder work and "they're all old" and "who likes grumpy old people anyway"?

      • "You know you are literally condoning genocide out if laziness, right? What's next? Shoot covid-carrying bipeds? Because a vaccine is a bit harder work and "they're all old" and "who likes grumpy old people anyway"?"

        Your proposed method might not appeal to some religious sects but pandemic-wise, there's no reason it wouldn't work, the Swedes tried your method too, I think.

      • Humans have wiped out Small Pox. That's technically genocide. You don't see anyone championing for bacterial rights. So your comment is a bit to binary to be an all-encompassing moral argument.

        • Not quite. There are a few samples left.at agencies like the CDC in the USA and the Vector agency in Russia. Whether to destroy them completely has been an awkward debate. That they exist at all leaves a risk that they will be used. If a preserved sample is accidentally or deliberately spread, those samples are part of how a new vaccine would be tested and generated.

          • Re: Resistant? (Score:4, Informative)

            by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Sunday January 31, 2021 @03:33PM (#61012912)

            If a preserved sample is accidentally or deliberately spread ...

            A leak has already happened: 1978 smallpox outbreak in the UK [wikipedia.org].

            The leak was caused by sloppy procedures, but also by the astounding incompetence of the lab allowing unvaccinated people to enter.

            Keeping the virus around is predicated on the assumption that the people running the labs are smart and competent. That apparently isn't the case.

            • It's also rooted in the concern that, if formally eradicated, a secretly preserved sample could be used as a devastating bio-weapon. This is why the US and Russia have the remaining samples. It's also _very_ difficult to evaluate the likelihood versus the risk of very unlikely events.

              That case was in 1978. I do hop that, in the 43 years since then, we've learned better how to store and, if necessary, handle such viruses safely. The growth of robotics and waldos and 3-D printing of disposable tools all may h

        • Humans have wiped out Small Pox. ... You don't see anyone championing for bacterial rights.

          Pedantic nitpick: Smallpox was caused by a virus, not bacteria.

    • You got some obnoxious comments to your perfectly valid question, so let me see if i can give you a better answer.

      Viruses follow a variety of strategies. Zika in particular isn't really a human virus (or monkey really, human spread is rare and usually accidental); rather it uses the primate in question as a carrier. It's primarily a mosquito virus. Since mosquitos must consume blood in order to lay eggs, the virus' strategy is to use the primate the mosquito bites as way to transmit from one mosquito

    • Can't they just modify them to be homicidal (insecticidal?) vs. the other sex, so that they kill each other?

      Birds, among other animals, rely on mosquitoes as a source of food. Eliminating them would cause an ecological imbalance with unpredictable consequences.

      • Can't they just modify them to be homicidal (insecticidal?) vs. the other sex, so that they kill each other?

        Birds, among other animals, rely on mosquitoes as a source of food. Eliminating them would cause an ecological imbalance with unpredictable consequences.

        Those who fail to learn from history [thevintagenews.com] and all that.

  • Better than trying to eradicate an entire species because some of them are a problem due to circumstsnces they didn't even choose themselves, like Bill Gates or Hitler.

  • DON'T!

  • I do appreciate their efforts. But why Zika rather than malaria; a disease which has effects that put even covid close to being but a footnote?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ludux ( 6308946 )
      Because white people are more scared of Zika, and only see fellow white people as deserving of efforts to protect them.
    • There's a lot of stupid comments on this page; like "because white people" from your other comment below.

      The reason is because malaria is a single-cell organism parasite. It's cycle is to attack vertebrate animals and utilize organ tissue like liver tissue to reproduce asexually. It uses the mosquito to transfer from one vertabrate to the next, including but not limited to humans; as the mosquito lays her eggs the new mosquitos also pick up the parasite and move on.

      Zika is a virus, and it targets mo

    • I assume it has to do with the fact that Zika is a virus, whereas malaria is a celled organism, indeed a eukaryote. That's one thing that makes malaria so hard to protect against, btw: it's not a bacteria (either), hence antibiotics don't work against it. And further, the malaria organism lives in the mosquito's digestive tract, unlike the virus.

      That said, there was some work a few years ago that showed it was possible to give the mosquitos a genetically modified symbiotic bacteria that inhibits the malar

    • I would bet that it's easier to make zika resistant mosquitos, for the same reason it's hard to make a good cure for malaria in humans.

    • Zika is a viral disease that uses a very specific receptor to enter the cells. They just removed it in the gene-engineered mosquitoes, so the virus is now ineffective against them.

      Malaria is caused by parasites that invade cells and eat them. They don't care about receptors.

  • ...Now imagine that instead of spreading disease, we could modify mosquitoes to carry useful bacteria that helps our system fight the bad ones?

    This way, we could really have an "ally" on our side.

  • consider.
    an anti-zika that could be tailored.
    one that enhances the human brain

  • so absolutely completely unambiguously right?

  • How about we "develop" mosquitoes that hate human blood? Thus solving the root problem

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