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Malaria, mosquitoes and man - breaking a deadly cycle (2)

Cod. C01042006

While some researchers in Keele University's Centre for Applied Entomology and Parasitology, are studying the biology of the mosquito, others are working on this genetic engineering approach, to see if they can inhibit the mosquito from passing on the parasite.

By injecting mosquito embryos with different genes with fluorescent markers that show up under ultraviolet light, they can track the genetically modified mosquitoes as they grow, and also see where the genes go. While they can introduce new genes, its not a precise process, and they can't yet predict where they might end up in a chromosome, or whether they could damage existing genes.

Professor Paul Eggleston said: "The main limitation is simply one of efficiency. This is a very inefficient and technically demanding procedure, so at Keele we've been trying to think up new ways to get round these limitations and inefficiencies. One way is to introduce a docking site into the mosquito chromosome. This is simply a target into which we can integrate any new gene of our choice and we know that if the genes go into this target site they are going to be reliably expressed and we also know that they are not going to have a negative impact on any of the normal genes within the mosquito."

The aim is to engineer a mosquito which is simply incapable of transmitting malaria.

Professor Paul Eggleston added: "What I would like to do with our new technology is to introduce a whole suite of transgenes, novel genes into the mosquito so we can have what I think of as a multi-hit approach. We want to be able to tackle the parasite at several different places within the insect all at the same time to make sure that no parasites survive and therefore we've effectively broken the transmission cycle."

The ultimate vision is to replace natural populations of malaria carrying mosquitoes in disease endemic areas, with a "genetically modified mosquito" incapable of carrying the malaria parasite, and freeing large sections of the world's population from the daily tragedy of young lives lost to this deadly disease.