| Selfish genes drive out malaria |
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2007-04-07, 14:21:21 Most genes in a body, like your own, work together to help you survive, make babies, and generally get on with life. But some genes are called "selfish" because they can work to reproduce themselves, even at the expense of the body that they're in. Now researchers have put this selfishness to good use, showing that selfish genes could be harnessed to drive malaria parasites from mosquitoes that carry the disease. This is pretty surprising to me because I would have thought a selfish gene would have hurt the mosquitoes carrying it, so that they wouldn't reproduce the others that lack the gene. In that case, the mosquitoes lacking the selfish gene would always win out, and they'd continue to carry malaria. But the new study suggests the resistant mosquitoes could win the struggle for existence, driving out the disease-carrying mosquitoes. The new research was actually in fruit flies, but the selfish gene they looked at could be transferred to mosquitoes. I'm sure in the long run, mosquitoes might mutate in a way that would get around this trick. But if the trick worked long enough, it could save a lot of lives. Also, it could conceivably work long enough to drive the malaria parasite to extinction. It's a long shot, but smallpox has been eliminated from the world (except for a couple stockpiles in labs), and polio has almost been eradicated. Those are both caused by viruses and are passed person-to-person, whereas malaria is caused by a bacteria carried by mosquitoes. But it still seems like eliminating malaria could still be possible. Read more about the recent experiment on SciDevNet. |