MCOM 202, Spring 2016

Biology Story

Dakota Phillip

Gene Drive Turns Insects Into Malaria Fighters

The battle of malaria rages on in many countries of the world including India. Mosquitoes
carry the deadly virus too hard to reach places where scientists of medicine cant afford to go or
get to. The fight against malaria just got a little easier with scientists being able to genetically
modified mosquitoes with a gene drive concept. In this case they can genetically modified
mosquitoes so that the mosquitoes are immune to the malaria parasite and they wont be able to
spread the deadly disease.
Nora Besanky, a geneticist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend India says that
positive results can bring us to zero cases, if done correctly. A conflict quickly occurred over
the implications of experimenting with genes and the risk of throwing off an ecosystem or even
eradicating an entire species. Most scientists find it unethical to genetically enhance genes of a
species because to them it feels like theyre playing God. According to sciencemag.org, in order
to be deployed in the field scientists need to, look at the ecological effects of the gene drive
changes, make sure the changes are stable over many generations, and develop a way to counter
or get rid of the gene drive if problems arise. This is important because mosquitoes that are
immune to the malaria virus could possibly throw off the cycle of the ecosystem and reproducing
of other mosquitoes in their species. They could also die off because of their genetically
modified genes that are not normal to regular mosquitoes in the environment.
The one of the problems with the gene drive of the mosquitoes is to know whether or not if
it actually worked or not. Valentine Gantz from Birds lab and Nijole Jasinkiene, a molecular
biologist at UC Irvine, discovered a way to figure out whether if the anti malaria gene works in
the gene drive system. They engineered the anti malaria gene in the mosquitoes along with
coming out the gene responsible for eye color in the mosquitoes. As a result, when they made it
the alternate mosquitoes with the normal ones they can see whether of the genes are passed or
not. It seemed to have worked with the mosquitoes that inherited the anti malaria gene had no
color in their eyes.

The technology was efficient, endowing about 99% of the transgenic male's offspring
with the added genes, Bier and James's teams report today in the Proceedings of the National
Academy of Science. And, as hoped, those genes were active in the mosquitoes. Earlier
experiments have shown that if the antibody genes were expressed, they thwarted the parasite.
And modeling suggests that with a gene drive of this efficiency, it should only take about 10
generations of mosquitoes for the anti malaria genes to completely infiltrate the population.
Pennisi, Elizabeth. "Gene Drive Turns Insects into Malaria Fighters." Gene Drive Turns Insects into
Malaria Fighters. Sciencemag.org, 23 Nov. 2015. Web. 05 Feb. 2016.