For years, researchers have been altering mosquito genetics in an attempt to halt the malaria parasite’s lifecycle in the insect before it can spread the disease. But getting the modified gene or genes to spread through a population of mosquitoes has proved to be an intractable problem. Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health are taking a different approach—introduce malaria-thwarting genetic changes into mosquito commensal flora.
“We thought that it would be easier to introduce bacteria than genes into mosquitoes in the field,” Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena told the blog Not Exactly Rocket Science (authored by Ed Yong, a regular contributor to The Scientist). Plus, the mosquito gut is the site of the malaria parasite's reproduction, a particularly vulnerable stage of Plasmodium's lifecycle.
Jacobs-Lorena and his team chose to work with Pantoea agglomerans, a harmless bacteria common to the mosquito gut, engineering it to fight the Plasmodium parasite. ...
