Slashdot Mirror
Glowing Mosquitos Aid Malaria Battle
kfz.versicherung writes "The glowing mosquitos were created by attaching a gene for fluorescence found in jellyfish to a gene expressed only in a male mosquito's sexual organs. Even if this sounds funny, this technique is used to collect all males which are then sterilized and released in areas plagued by malaria flies. While sterile female mosquito can still transmit malaria, the sterile males will mate with the females but produce no offspring, so the insect population drops. An automated machine, capable of sorting 18,000 larvae per hour, detects fluorescence inside the larvae and a puff of air will divert the males into a separate area."
Okay, why make their "gonads" flouresce if you're just gonna make'em sterile? Doesn't help in sorting the offspring.
This is what I gathered from TFA:
1 - Breed thousands of modified mosquitoes in a lab so the males have flourescent "gonads"
2 - Put them through a sorting machine that sorts out all the ones that glow
3 - Sterilize the batch that were glowing
4 - Release them into the wild and they'll hook up with the females
5 - Less baby mosquitoes
Problems that first occured to me with that:
1 - Why not just sterilize them all? Is that hard or something? It said that the females "still spread malaria" so maybe it's that only female mosquitoes suck blood. Thats what wikipedia says. So I guess they just don't want to introduce a whole bunch of disease carrying insects.
2 - Are mosquitoes monogamous? Why will this cut down on their population? If the males are sterile, won't the females still want to breed or something? Wikipedia doesn't go into that...
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
I thought we weren't going to practice genetic discrimination.
Scientist 1: "Ok here's the thing: we need to kill off these mosquitos."
Scientist 2: "Right, so how do we kill em?"
Scientist 1: "Well first we round up as many as we can possibly find."
Scientist 2: "Ahhh...then we kill em."
Scientist 1: "No no no, then we make their privates glow--but just the males."
Scientist 2: "Uh....why?"
Scientist 1: "So that they won't breed."
Scientist 2: "Right....but won't killing them also have the same effect?"
Scientist 1: "Sorry, can't hear you, this machine is busy sorting the 50,000 larvae I gathered this morning into male and females!"
Seriously, why would you spend all that time and money building a machine to sort 18,000 larvae per hour instead of just building an equally impressive FLY KILLING MACHINE.
DDT is still being used in many third-world countries.
So let me get this straight:
Step 1: Alter a few mosquitoes using this expensive process.
Step 2: Allow fluorescence gene to propagate in the wild.
Step 3: Introduce machine that effectively ends the genetic line of fluorescing males.
Do they intend to keep running Step 1? I'd like to know how they expect to keep these flourescent males in circulation when they are constantly employing natural selection to end their genetic lines.
(That, and I'd like to see the actual paper... I can't find the article on Nature Biotechnology, but that's just my lousy skills.)
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
welcome our glowing insect overlords
Biological warfare is beginning to get interesting. For years, the best we could do against insect pests was to kill off the weakest ones, leaving the most capable to reproduce and multiply. We were just hastening evolution, and making our enemies stronger.
As a result, we now have resistent insects, resistent bacteria, and we're beginning to see new outbreaks of viruses that we thought we had eradicated.
We were trying to fight a faceless, undying mob by overpowering them with brute strength. Now, we're learning better. Instead of brute strength, we've begun to exploit our only advantage: intelligence. We're finding ways to use our enemies against themselves. Instead of multiplying in strength, we will help the insects to multiply themselves into oblivion.
Let's just hope we don't hasten the evolution of mammalian maternal traits in the insects in the process.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Once the female mosquitos see the male mosquito gonads glowing, wont they suspect something is wrong??? I know my wife would never have sex with me if mine were glowing.
Just reading the summary will explain all of your questions.
The fluorescent gene will not propagate in the wild, because it is only attached to sterile mosquitos. The fluorescence is only used to sort the males from the females.
As for "step 3", you just made that up. Nowhere in the article or in the summary does it talk about using a machine to kill wild mosquitos after they've been allowed to multiply.
DDT resistant mosquitos appeared in 1960 and have spread pretty much everywhere. Using more DDT doesn't work since the mosquitos become more and more resistant due to overexpression of cytochrome P450. Meanwhile, things like fish, birds and people who happen to eat those fish or birds get increasing concentrations of DDT and eventually get poisoned or start seeing birth defects.
Unfortunately, we don't go through a few generations every few months and can't quickly develop DDT resistance like mosquitos. The falcons were just an indicator and continuing would have increased the incidence of birth defects in people.
"When you sit with a nice girl for two hours, it seems like two minutes. When you sit on a hot stove for two minutes, it
Manipulating "mother nature" in any form is a very bad idea, IMHO. So we have now made these mosquitoes visible for the benefit of the Human race. The ultimate question remains - how will they affect their/our eco-system? Could they evolve beyond their current nusiance state into a more damaging state because of our human intervention? We're basically mutating them about 1 million years ahead on the evolutionary scale, yet in a matter of a few human years.
It's just as possible to be too smart for one's own good, as it is to be too stupid. It's called Darwinism and it works on every evolutionary front (progressive and digressive).
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I mean, just think of how labor intensive it must be to anesthetize the mosquitos, put each one down under a magnifying glass, and with a very steady hand, snip off the relevant bits.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
As far as the second concern, sterile insects still mate, its just that nothing happens in the end. The eggs are laid believed to be fertilized when in fact they aren't.
As you may be aware, only female mosquitoes suck blood (and thereby transmit disease). The blood is to feed the eggs they lay. (Mosquitoes mostly feed on nectar, but eggs need protein.)
Whem a female mosquito has mated and found a blood meal (I forget the order of those two, but it doesn't matter), it will lay eggs.
Now, here's the trick: by captive breeding and then releasing zillions of sterile male mosquitoes, which will hunt down and mate with wild female mosquitoes, those eggs will not hatch, and the number of wild mosquitoes will go down. (Until the females evolve some defense like multiple matings.)
So you have *effectively* sterilized the wild females. This is a good thing.
You'd prefer not to release female mosquitoes, because even if they're sterile, they'll still suck blood and spread disease.
The article is about a technique for sexing captive-bred mosquitoes. By adding a very easy-to-see sex marker. None of this affects the generits of the wild population at all. They're just building an army of little biological robots that will hunt down and neutralize wild females.
Glow-in-the-dark mosquito is A GOOD THING.
Nothing like sitting in the porch, staring out across the landscape and deciding when to shuck the evening BBQ in, to go indoor, when one can SEE the enemy approaching in increasing numbers.
I'd say make the entire population glow THEN sterilizes them.
Oh... flourescent and glow-in-the-dark are not the same thing??? Well, here's my idea above...
OK. I'm going to attempt to figure out the logic in this method.
Let's say we have a population of 2x mosquitos, x males, and x females. Let's collect 2y mosquitos. Half of those will be male, and half female.
If we kill all of the mosquitos we collect, you end up with 2x-2y mosquitos left in the population.
Now, instead of killing all the mosquitos we collected, let's use the proposed method of killing all y females, and releasing y sterile males. The population of mosquitos is now 2x-y, which is worse than if we had just killed them all.
But let's see what we get in the next generation. Let's assume that the mosquito population is steady across generations. (That seems like a fair assumption -- it's unlikely to be increasing too much, since we killed y females.) So we can therefore assume that each mating pair would produce 2 surviving offspring. Let's also assume monogamous pairings (which could just be the result of death soon after mating). So each male can mate only once, and only x-y males will be potent, so the next generation's population would be 2(x-y) = 2x-2y mosquitos. Hmm. So either this way is no more effective than killing all that you collect, or I've made an invalid assumption about mating pair's monogamy or the steady (non-increasing) population.
Can anyone verify which assumption I made was incorrect? Or did I miss something else? Perhaps the sterile males are more likely to survive than the wild males (since they were well-treated in the lab)?
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
were created by attaching a gene for fluorescence found in jellyfish to a gene expressed only in a male mosquito's sexual organs.
Wow, those must be some damn sexy male mosquitos.
I mean, a glowing dick... Looks cool and is very practical if you're in a dark room.
DDT was highly effective at injuring people, too. Even if you have a dislike for falcons, this may be of concern. Maybe the war on mosquitos should swich from DDT to TNT. As they say: if you can't solve a problem with explosives, use more explosives!
Nuffsaid
________
Don't know about his cat, but Schroedinger is definitely dead.
what will be next i wonder Red light emitting girls or green light emmitting men, could be handy at night ;)
I know you're out there. I can feel you now. I know that you're afraid. You're afraid of us. You're afraid of change.
As a founding member of PETI-People for the Ethical Treatment of Insects-I am outraged by this immoral manipulation of an insect species. These scientists can expect a torch-bearing mob at their doorstep very soon......
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."
Why bother with this elaborate scheme to sterilize males and release them back into the wild ? These things are a serious threat to our health, why can't we just kill them all and be done with it ?
:P
Though I wish the same logic could be applied to certain human continents
-Billco, Fnarg.com
I was exposed to tritium (funny enough from doing sequencing work on VEE, wee, and dengue) so now my gonads glow. Now I find women chasing me whenever I go to the bar. They keep asking for X.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sadly, the lowly mosquito does not get the credit that it deserves (even though it is infamous for spreading disease). We have only scratch the surface of all known virus. Down the road we will find that there are many more virus that simply transfer genetic material, but do no known harm. These virus help convey evolution changes in small chunk. As time goes on, they transfer enough that new genes are created. Most probably express lousy or nothing at all. But a few will be useful.
Quite honestly, I think that if we could kill off all mosquitos, we would find our evolution slowed down a great deal.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The evidence for this is real simple.
Where are all the new species coming from? Where ever there are new species without a skelatal history (and none are forthcoming), that is an indication that it was recent evolution.
OTH, if you look where the species come from and you find skelatal history, then they have been around, but have simply not been seen.
Almost certainly, the recent evolution can be mapped and I would bet that it will be in areas of high mosquito concentrations. More importantly, the old species, but recently found, will be all over including in areas with low mosquito counts, i.e. in equal distribution.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This makes me think we have a lot of research which can be done with bioluminescence.
Not just last week I was watching a National Geographic show whereby they were taking the genes which make fireflies glow, splicing it into the genes of the tumour causing stuff they did for research, and injecting it into mice.
The result was the cancerous timours which grew in lab mice produced enough light as to make the tumour visible to scanning equipment. This let them start to look at the way the tumours spread.
I wonder how many other cool things they'll be able to figure out using these techniques.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
The song, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer could have an entirely new set of lyrics if this technology were widely used.
Or am I wrong? The article was not very clear. But if they added a gene to make the male mosquitoes glow, just to sort them out they made a big mistake. The females which mate with glow males will not reproduce and so their gene pool goes
into oblivion. On the other hand, the offsprings which result from non sterile males will have an interesting characteristic. This will be in effect in 10 generations or something if not straight away. The females will just be turned off
by the glow males and will not mate with them. Bingo, back to square one.
But if the mosquitoes are blind to glow, and cannot detect the sterile males then this work would be succesful.
You will never have experience until after you needed it.
GFP or Green Flourescent Protein is probably what they used. it only glows when hit with a laser of certain wavelength. Not like a firefly (luciferin/luciferase) glowing all the time or on command. I suppose jellyfish control it somehow though. This is the principal of FACS or Flourescence Automated Cell Sorting. Except usually you are not working with larvae but cells. Basically this is a reporter gene to let you know that the gene you really wanted to pop in to a cell/organism got in there. If no green then your gene did not get in there. If green then what you did worked. At first i thought they were using GFP to find sterile/non-sterile males but it looks like they just tag all males and somehow make lots of sterile male/female larvae. This is a very common lab technique used with many flourescent proteins/chemicals. GFP orignally discovered by Woods Hole Oceanographic researchers.
I'll be filing an infringement lawsuit against these mosquitoes. The glowing bug schtick was ours first, dammit...
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
It seems the obvious answer to this mosquito problem is to genetically alter a male mosquito to only produce Y (male) sperm. That way, only male offspring are produced. These offspring, carrying the Y-only sperm gene, will only produce male offspring who also carrry the gene. Eventually, XY-sperm producing males will be outnumbered and the mosquito population will decrease to zero.
heck? If you have sterile males trying to breed females and not being sucessful, won't another dude come along and poke her too? I don't really think that those critters die after being mated once, though I don't know. I'd think you'd want to leave the sterile ones in the population instead of killing them, so to create compitition for food between them and non-altered ones (though I doubt it'd be of significant impact) and so there are sterile males still in circulation as we wait for the ones with loaded guns to die off. I kind of like the flamethrower aproach myself.