Re: [DIYbio] Re: Pathogenic Mosquito Sanitizer?

Yeay! Wolbachia!
Heard a lecture about them some years ago.
Very interesting model organism!

Wasn't there a species, where wolbachia invading a Wolbachia-naive
population could be monitored while it was happening,
as well as the counter-evolution after some years, where the
species became Wolbachia-resistant ?


Am Dienstag, den 05.06.2012, 12:37 +0100 schrieb Cathal Garvey:
> You guys should look up "wolbachia", you'll love it.
> It's a bacterial family that infect flies, and shorten their lifespan
> measurably. However, oddly enough it enforces its own "inheritance" from
> mother flies to the eggs, so it behaves like a heritable parasite. With
> some human assistance, it's thought we could encourage entire habitats
> to become dominated by infected flies.
>
> Because it reduces their lifespans, it reduces their odds of catching
> malaria and transmitting it; there's apparently a strong link between
> mosquito lifespan and ability to cross-infect.
>
> With some synbio engineering, we could probably make it even better, and
> get wolbachia to create a selective pressure that we can exploit,
> perhaps by (as suggested previously) making the bacterium emit
> antimalarial drugs into the fly's haemolymph ("blood").
>
> Also worth looking up is the "mariner" family of transposons. This
> family emerged or became apparent after we began captive cultivation of
> fruit flies from wild populations. Within decades, it completely
> dominated the wild populations of fruit flies. How? Because it triggers
> homologous recombination during embryonic development; any embryos that
> start out with only one copy of the gene (inherited from either parent)
> end up with two copies of the gene, meaning they are guaranteed to pass
> it to their offspring. It's like ultra-dominance.
>
> If you wanted to "edit" wild mosquitoes to make the immune to malaria,
> add in a homing endonuclease to your gene cassette targeting the "empty"
> wild chromosomes, and you'll do better than simple evolution: you'll
> rapidly wipe out the non-resistant gene entirely.


--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DIYbio" group.
To post to this group, send email to diybio@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to diybio+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/diybio?hl=en.