Microbe stops mosquitoes from harboring malaria parasite

Microbe stops mosquitoes from harboring malaria parasite

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C. Offord,  Science,  2023.

Researchers have tried to use microbes to control mosquito-borne diseases before. The virus-fighting bacterium Wolbachia pipientis has shown particular promise against dengue fever in recent clinical trials and is already used in some areas of the world. But most methods for blocking malaria-causing Plasmodium parasites, which are transmitted by different mosquito species from dengue, have relied on genetically modified bacteria. That’s a major obstacle to regulatory and public acceptance, Barillas-Mury notes, given the unknowns of releasing edited organisms into the wild. The latest news, commentary, and research, free to your inbox daily The bacterium in the new study, published today in Science, inhibits the malaria parasite without any genetic tinkering by humans. Janneth Rodrigues, a scientific lead in global health medicines R&D at GlaxoSmithKline, and colleagues stumbled across the microbe at a GSK research center in Spain, after noticing the mosquitoes they were using for malaria research were getting harder to infect with Plasmodium.