Scholarly Literature

This is a database of scholarly literature that concentrates currently on natural and engineered selfish genetic elements (gene drives).  The latest are shown here.
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Long-Term Durability and Public Health Impact of City-Wide wMel Wolbachia Mosquito Releases in Niterói, Brazil, During a Dengue Epidemic Surge

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Anders, Katherine L., Gabriel Sylvestre Ribeiro, Renato da Silva Lopes, Pilar Amadeu, Thiago Rodrigues da Costa, Thais Irene Souza Riback, Karlos Diogo de Melo Chalegre, Wesley Pimentel de Oliveira, Cátia Cabral da Silva, Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mendes B,  Tropical Medicine and Infectious Disease,  10. 2025.
In 2024, the Americas experienced the largest dengue outbreak on record and Brazil was among the worst affected countries, reporting 6.6 million cases and 6200 deaths. We report the long-term entomological and epidemiological effectiveness of city-wide deployment ...

Genomic Insights into Wolbachia Strain wCin2USA1 Reveal Promising Cytoplasmic Incompatibility Potential and Next-Generation Dengue Biocontrol

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Istiaque Zaeem, Nurnabi Azad Jewel, Mohimenul Haque Rolin, et al.,  bioRxiv,  2025.
Dengue fever is one of the fastest-growing mosquito-borne diseases in the world, causing illness and economic challenges in many countries. Current mosquito control methods, such as insecticides, are often costly, less effective over time, and harmful to the environment. An ...

Autosomally-encoded segregation distortion of sex chromosomes

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Greenberg Naomi L., Patten Manus M. and Schenkel Martijn A.,  Proc. R. Soc. B.,  292. 2025.
Some selfish genetic elements drive at meiosis to achieve transmission distortion, breaking the rules of Mendelian segregation to enhance their own evolutionary success. It has been shown that enhancers of drive must act in cis in order to gain the selfish benefit of drive and ...

The shibirets4 mutation causes temperature sensitive paralytic and lethal phenotypes in the Queensland fruit fly, Bactrocera tryoni

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Anzu Okada, Mamoru Okamoto, Thu N.M. Nguyen, et al.,  Insect Science,  2025.
Bactrocera tryoni, the Queensland fruit fly, is among the most damaging insect pests to the Australian horticultural industry as larvae infest ripening fruits or vegetables prior to harvest. Genetic biocontrol using Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) programs have been used to ...

Spindle checkpoint can secure additional cheating time for selfish expanded centromeres

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Walton, R. Zaak et al.,  Current Biology,  35:3687-3696. 2025.
Expanded centromeric satellite repeats can violate Mendel’s law of segregation by preferentially segregating to the egg. In mice, these selfish centromeres enrich microtubule destabilizers at pericentromeres to detach from the spindle and flip toward the egg side of the meiotic ...

Comparison of the standard and boosted sterile insect techniques for the suppression of Aedes albopictus populations under semi-field conditions

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Marlène Dupraz, Renaud Lancelot, Gorgui Diouf, et al.,  Parasite,  32. 2025.
Innovative control tools are needed against Aedes mosquitoes. The boosted sterile insect technique (bSIT) consists of treating sterile males with a biocide prior to their release to contaminate larval habitats. We compared the efficacy of SIT and boosted SIT to prevent the ...

Growth and development of two predator species fed a diet of genetically engineered mosquitoes

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Egan, C.M., Chamberland, L., Ditter, R.E. et al.,  Parasites Vectors,  18. 2025.
Genetically engineered mosquitoes (GEMs) with gene drives have been developed for malaria control but remain untested in natural environments. Upon release, GEMs are expected to modify or replace wild-type counterparts, potentially uniquely interacting with nontarget organisms ...

Emerging challenges for mosquito-borne disease control and the promise of symbiont-based transmission-blocking strategies

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Gao H, Hu W, Cui C, Wang Y, Zheng Y, Jacobs-Lorena M, et al.,  PLoS Pathog,  21. 2025.
Mosquitoes serve as vectors for a variety of pathogens that cause life-threatening diseases, such as malaria, dengue, Zika, and yellow fever. With the rise of antimalarial drug resistance and a lack of therapeutics or prophylactics for dengue and Zika, current disease control ...

Genetic control strategies for population suppression in the Anopheles gambiae complex: a review of current technologies

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Alekos Simoni, Ignacio Tolosana, Federica Bernardini,  Current Opinion in Insect Science,  2025.
Malaria continues to pose a critical public health threat, with mosquitoes from the Anopheles gambiae complex acting as the main vectors of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa, where approximately 95% of malaria-related deaths occur. Despite significant advancements in vector ...

Effectiveness of the sterile insect technique in controlling Aedes albopictus as part of an integrated control measure: evidence from a first small-scale field trial in Switzerland

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Parrondo Monton, D., Ravasi, D., Campana, V. et al.,  Infect Dis Poverty,  14. 2025.
The invasive Asian tiger mosquito (Aedes albopictus) poses growing health risks across Europe. In Switzerland, a preliminary field trial was conducted to assess the feasibility of integrating the sterile insect technique (SIT) into existing integrated vector management (IVM), ...

Field Performance of a Self-Limiting, Genetically Engineered Fall Armyworm for Biological Pest Management

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Reavey Catherine E. , Domingues Felipe A. , Ercit Kyla, et al.,  Sec. Pest Management,  7. 2025.
The fall armyworm is one of the most globally significant agricultural pests, damaging corn, sorghum and other crops central to food production. It has developed resistance to several classes of chemical insecticides and, more recently, insect-resistant ‘Bt’ biotech corn ...

Conditional expression of Cas9 and dCas9 in Lucilia cuprina reveals dCas9-associated lethality

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Alexis Kriete, Tatiana Basika, Rossina Novas, et al.,  bioRxiv,  2025.
Conditional sex transformation systems are promising tools in the fight against insect pests. In this study, we developed and tested CRISPR-based, tetracycline-repressible sex transformation strains in the Australian sheep blowfly, Lucilia cuprina. Two CRISPR effector molecules, ...

Novel stressors and trait variation determine X-linked meiotic drive frequency

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Fisher Adam M., White Nicola, Bonsall Michael B., Price Tom AR. and Knell Robert J.,  Proc. R. Soc. B.,  292. 2025.
Sex ratio meiotic drive alleles bias their transmission by impairing the viability of non-drive gametes, leading to skewed population sex ratios. Despite theoretical predictions that drive alleles should reach fixation causing population extinction, meiotic drive persists at ...

Centromeres drive and take a break

Talbert, P.B., Henikoff, S.,  Chromosome Res,  33. 2025.
The identification of CENPA, CENPB, and CENPC by Earnshaw and Rothfield 40 years ago has revealed the remarkable diversity and complexity of centromeres and confirmed most seed plants and animals have centromeres comprised of complex satellite arrays. The rapid evolution of ...

Drive, suppression, and escape from suppression of a selfish chromosome

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Jackson Taylor Ridges, Jackson Bladen, Robert L. Unckless, Nitin Phadnis,  bioRxiv,  2025.
Meiotic drivers are selfish chromosomes that are predicted to spark a rapid intragenomic arms-race with their suppressors. However, the long-term persistence of unsuppressed selfish chromosomes in natural populations violates these theoretical expectations. The Drosophila ...

Genome Editing in Insect Pest Control: Importance, Strategies, and Future Implications

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Ipsita Samal, Tanmaya Kumar Bhoi, Deepak Kumar Mahanta, Ansh Raj, J. Komal, Alagesan Keerthana, Vinod Kumar Dubey,  Genome Editing for Pest Management,  2025.
Genome editing is a cutting-edge tool in biotechnology which brought about substantial changes in a variety of areas, including agriculture and pest control. As properly managing insect pests is critical for protecting food supplies and ensuring produce security, insect species ...

Sequence mismatch between gene-drive and target-site flanking regions significantly impairs homing efficiency in Culex quinquefasciatus

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Tim Harvey-Samuel, Rajdeep Kaur, Philip T Leftwich, et al.,  bioRxiv,  2025.
CRISPR/Cas9-based homing gene-drives (homing-drives) hold enormous potential as control tools for mosquito disease-vectors. These genomically-encoded technologies spread themselves through target populations by creating double-stranded DNA breaks on homologous chromosomes, into ...

Spatiotemporal complexity in interacting wild and sterile mosquito populations

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Mandal, G., Guin, L.N. & Chakravarty, S.,  Nonlinear Dyn,  2025.
In the present exploration, a mosquito population model is investigated that incorporates a non-linear, saturated release rate for sterile mosquitoes. The model framework leverages a reaction-diffusion system to generate spatiotemporal patterns. A thorough theoretical analysis is ...

Suppression of sex-ratio drive in Drosophila subobscura

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Sophie Lyth, Tom Gill, Andri Manser, et al.,  Evolution,  2025.
Selfish genetic elements enjoy an evolutionary advantage by enhancing their own transmission to offspring, and their genetic suppressors are favored when they re-establish fair inheritance patterns. Here, we study an X-linked sex ratio drive system (SR) in Drosophila subobscura, ...

Threshold-dependent improvement in sex separation efficiency by NaCl pretreatment of larval–pupal mixtures in mass-reared Aedes albopictus

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Yan Sun, Junyan Zhang, Keqing Zheng, et al.,  Pest Science Management,  2025.
The removal of female mosquitoes is a critical requirement in sterile insect technique (SIT) for mosquito control. Improving the efficiency and accuracy of sex sorting is therefore vital. Previous studies have demonstrated that treating larval–pupal mixtures with a 15% sodium ...

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