What if GM mosquitoes could help limit the tiger mosquito population?
|
|
Anonymous,
All News Press,
2024.
What if the fight against the tiger mosquito, this invasive species originating from Southeast Asia and established in France for about twenty years, was not totally lost in advance? The exploratory project of Éric Marois, research officer Inserm, within the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Biology (CNRS) in Strasbourgoffers some hope. This fundamental biology researcher explains to 20 Minutes that thanks to Crispr/Cas9 molecular scissors it is possible to cut DNA at a specific location to create a transgenic mosquito. This will either transform female tiger mosquitoes into males or make their offspring sterile. To sort the insects thus modified, they are made fluorescent in the laboratory. An update on this work, funded for at least four years by the national research agency and which could make headlines in the coming years. Genetic engineering, or the idea of using genetic elements to modify the characteristics of mosquitoes, dates back to the 1960s. But at the time, there were no tools at all to carry it out in the laboratory. It was in 2012, with the discovery of the Crispr/Cas9 molecular scissors, which earned Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, that its application was truly made possible. It involves artificially producing a guide RNA (as exists in nature) and thus directing the Cas9 protein to a chosen DNA sequence within the desired genome. More related to this: Guidelines and Standard Operating Procedures for Research on Genetically Engineer Insects, 2023 |
