How to fight insects that transmit diseases to people without harming those who cannot?

One way to avoid this severe environmental impact is to specifically control the population of species that cause problems. This can be done chemically by releasing hormones into the environment that prevent passage to the adult stage, or pheromones that make them believe that a beautiful insect is waiting for them ready for sex, when in fact they fell in the trap of death. The problem with these methods is that sometimes the required molecules are very expensive and not always specific to what we want. A more effective strategy is to sterilize the population of male insects with radioactivity. In nature, these males mate with females, but cannot produce children. This technique has been used for a long time with reasonable results, although it is not 100% effective and the use of radioactivity means the appearance of mutations and it may happen (unlikely) that some give some development for the insect, and a recurring problem for us.However, genetic engineering offers us help. CRISPR/Cas9 is a technology that allows us to make specific changes in a specific area of ​​the genome of any living organism. We can give it a twist and, instead of applying this technique to the genome of an insect by making a specific modification, what we do is modify an insect so that its genome has everything it needs to activate CRISPR/Cas9. time and cause sterility. It’s like hiding in your genome a complete CRISPR/Cas9 kit and the instructions to change a specific gene to create sterility. What is the advantage? If we only disperse the sterile males, those that are not sterile (sterilization is never 100% and we have to compete with the native population) will continue to reproduce, and in a few generations the effect will disappear.

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