Olivia Judson's evolution blog
December 9th 2008 07:29
In case anyone's interest, the biologist Olivia Judson has a highly entertaining and fascinating blog on the New York Times website, called The Wild Side. She provides regular stories about issues in evolution, including genetics and disease control, human psychology, natural history and sexual selection, and lots more. She is also the author of the wonderfully hilarious and informative Dr Tatiana's Sex Advice to all Creation.
Here is an excerpt from her blog, where she talks about the latest efforts to bring dengue fever under control by genetically engineering its vector, the mosquito species Aedes aegypti:
"There are several ways that A. aegypti could be engineered so as to interrupt the transmission of dengue. One possibility is to make mosquitoes that are unable to transmit the viruses. The idea would be to release them into the wild in the hopes that they would mate with normal mosquitoes, and resistance would spread.
But I prefer a simpler approach. Here, mosquitoes are engineered to have a built-in flaw: a gene that is lethal when the insect becomes a pupa. Males carrying this gene would then be released. Wild females who mated with one of these males would lay eggs as usual, the larvae would develop as usual — but when they got to the pupa stage, the insects would die. (From the point of view of control, death at this late stage is an advantage, because the animals still occupy the pool as larvae. This is useful because larvae compete with each other for food, so their presence in a pool helps, in and of itself, to keep the population down.)
But if mosquitoes carrying this gene die at the pupal stage, how do you ever manage to rear any males to release? This is the clever part. The mosquitoes are engineered so that whether the gene is lethal depends on what the larvae eat. If their diet contains a certain crucial ingredient, the killer gene does not get turned on. But in the absence of the crucial ingredient, the gene is turned on, and the animals die."
Continue reading here.
So check it out! Put her blog into your favourites list and stay tuned, because she always provide some food for thought.
Blog url: Really Long Link
Here is an excerpt from her blog, where she talks about the latest efforts to bring dengue fever under control by genetically engineering its vector, the mosquito species Aedes aegypti:
"There are several ways that A. aegypti could be engineered so as to interrupt the transmission of dengue. One possibility is to make mosquitoes that are unable to transmit the viruses. The idea would be to release them into the wild in the hopes that they would mate with normal mosquitoes, and resistance would spread.
But I prefer a simpler approach. Here, mosquitoes are engineered to have a built-in flaw: a gene that is lethal when the insect becomes a pupa. Males carrying this gene would then be released. Wild females who mated with one of these males would lay eggs as usual, the larvae would develop as usual — but when they got to the pupa stage, the insects would die. (From the point of view of control, death at this late stage is an advantage, because the animals still occupy the pool as larvae. This is useful because larvae compete with each other for food, so their presence in a pool helps, in and of itself, to keep the population down.)
Continue reading here.
So check it out! Put her blog into your favourites list and stay tuned, because she always provide some food for thought.
Blog url: Really Long Link
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