Driving mosquito refractoriness to Plasmodium falciparum with engineered symbiotic bacteria
Getting to the guts of mosquito control Malaria persistently evades our best efforts to eliminate it. Pike et al. genetically modified malaria vector mosquitoes to be more immune-resistant to infection by the parasite, which altered the composition of the mosquitoes' gut bacteria. Genetically modified male (female) mosquitoes preferentially mated with wild-type females (males). Ten generations later, the genetically modified mosquitoes constituted 90% of a caged population without losing resistance to the malaria parasite. In an alternative strategy, Wang et al. engineered mosquitoes' gut bacteria. A strain of nonpathogenic bacteria, AS1, was both sexually and transgenerationally transmitted. The strain infected a laboratory population of mosquitoes and persisted for at least three generations. AS1 engineered to inhibit malaria parasite development in the midgut could do so without handicapping the mosquitoes. Science , this issue p. 1396 , p. 1399