Re: [DIYbio] Re: Pathogenic Mosquito Sanitizer?

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.

On 05/06/12 11:56, Margret Storm wrote:
> I'm glad you're so enthused about the competing Plasmodium idea, Matthias!
> But I wanted to clarify - I wanted to use the virus as a vector to
> introduce an alteration of the mosquito larva's DNA, not to kill it (since
> natural breeding can be so hit-and-miss for inheritance).
>
> On Saturday, June 2, 2012 4:12:24 AM UTC-4, Margret Storm wrote:
>>
>> Would it be possible to engineer a contagious bacterial strain that
>> resided in the digestive tracts of mosquitoes, and had little effect other
>> than releasing antimicrobial enzymes into the pharynx and salivary glands?
>> Hopefully, this would prevent the spread of mosquito-borne diseases like
>> malaria, as well as help prevent secondary infection of bites.
>>
>> Forgive me in advance for any ignorance - the idea has been bugging me
>> (hah), and I really want to know.
>>
>

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