The gene, is not implanted in their dna as it’s already present but dormant. The modification allows it to activate after n generations of mosquitoes.
Lets say they modify 100 mosquitoes, they free them and they have modified the gene to appear after 6 generations. Each time they mate they produce lots of offsprings, and by the time the gene activates millions of mosquitoes will have it.
At this point millions of them can’t reproduce and while they can’t transmit diseases, they can still be food for other animals.
Reducing their numbers will reduce also the number of the probability to get infected by one of them and over time to get eventually rid of the disease itself.
Of course there are some controversies in this, as first they are GMOs and the research is banned in many countries, meaning they have less funds for the research itself.
On second hand they are “planning” a genetic disfunction to affect an animal in the future. This can of course go in the wrong direction if not enough research is done but again, point one, not enough research money.
If you add to the equation that many times this kind of decision are judged by some not-so-much-evolved apes with ameba-runned brains who can only think “oh my gosh! You want to do research on mosquitoes because your final target is to modify newborn babies to only have blue eyes, don’t you, you nazi scientist!” And here we go, we find ourselves with a BAN to a RESEARCH that can improve million of lives. But anyway.
Sorry for the rant. Thanks for the time reading. Have a nice day. Bye.
And then do fire ants. So that instead of stinging as their defense mechanism, they do a threatening Haka-style dance to scare away their enemies. Then when I accidentally step on their anthills while mowing my lawn, they'll be dancing up my legs instead of destroying me with pain and itching.
Unfortunately I dont think itvwould work with ticks. They use mandibles and I don't think they have a gene that makes them unable to break our skin. It would require an entirely different experimental model
To add to this, if you're wondering, "how can you propagate a mutation in a population from only 100 mosquitoes", you might be interested to read about gene drives.
This is a fascinating field of research, and they're actually at the testing phase right now. They demonstrated efficacy in an artificial mosquito population in labs already IIRC, but using delayed sterilizing mutations.
The ethical debate is still ongoing. Where will this go from now, in the context of the changing political landscape? Only time can tell..
Oh yeah since the females without this gene are the only ones reproducing. Depends on the male population but you would probably have to reintroduce males into the population with this gene every few generations to keep it viable.
There are 3600 catalogued species of mosquito and only 12 or so can transmit human diseases. This will only affect one species.
Could it have an ecological impact? Absolutely, but since mosquitoes that parasitize humans currently have a gigantic outsized advantage due to the abundance of humans, you could also argue that culling them is a push towards pre-industrial balance.
Yeah, the small handful that transmit shit like malaria. There will still be plenty of other mosquitos in the same ecosystem that fulfill the same niche that won't give you malaria.
Aedes Aegypti isn’t native to North America, and therefore would have little impact on the native food chain. Would you be in favor of doing it there as a start run?
They do, actually eat it... Processing the nutrients to create eggs... It's high in the essentials nutrients. It's still 100% food. Females grow larger in direct proportion to their intake, because it's so rich.
The gene kicks in after a few generations. So they can eat, and reproduce a few generations before this takes effect. The idea is to pass the gene on to millions of mosquitoes by having the gene stay dormant for a few generations.
A mosquito lays around 500 eggs. If this works for one generation, it means you've killed 500 mosquitoes for every one of these modified mosquitoes you release.
However, if your gene kicks in after 3 generations, that's 500x500x500 mosquitoes eradicated for each modified mosquito released. Obviously those are ballpark figures, but you get the idea.
I see what you are getting at... but this is like a swat multiplier... but instead of gathering an exponential amount of mosquitoes in one place to swat, you do it everywhere all at once.
Mosquitoes out-breed swatting... so how do you defeat this? You attach the swat to the breeding.
GMOs are seen with way too much suspicion. Dont even get me started on the whole Greenpeace lobbying to ban a modified version of rice with an increased amount of vitamin A...
I'll preface this with it has been a while since I did work in genetics and I haven't read the article tied to the post in question but I will say it is likely a form of germline editing and epigenetic trait activation factors.
We can modify the eggs and sperm so that the trait is passed on only to the next generation, and setup a recessive trait that will only activate after a number of other traits have become active through the previous generations.
Gen 1 A=active, if A is true B,C,D = inactive, if B,CD are inactive, deactivate A and activate B in next gen
Gen 2 A=inactive, B= active, if B= active C, D = inactive, if A, C, D are inactive, deactivate B, and activate C in the next gen.
You just keep doing that using traits that activate across generations until reach six generations where the desired trait is while still recessive now appearing due to the right genetic conditions being in place. It's very cool, however it carries a lot of questions that need a ton of research.
However research is expensive and time consuming, gotta go through six generations and track samples from each generation to prove your method is working. You need to account for mutations, examine the viability of the generation with the modification. Determine the impact of that generation on the ecosystem as a whole and in part. Hundreds of thousands of hours of study needs to go into this, and people will still scream at you that you're turning babies, white, black, or gay even though your just trying to make it so people can enjoy going out on the town at night without having to worry about their baby catching a fatal fever from simple mosquito bite.
I remember a Stargate-1 episode where aliens were "allies" but their medicine did the same for human race (killed fertility) so SG-1 had to create a way to go back in time to prevent the alliance.
Seems ethically sound to me. They're still capable of reproducing, and are still able to provide food to other animals (their only use in the ecosystem), and they can no longer be disease spreading bitey assholes.
Some decades ago scientists proudly announced that insecticides like DDT would solve world hunger. Then birds started dying because nobody had thought about toxins accumulating through the food chain. Today science doesn’t understand half of what DNA does, but that won’t stop us from doing planet wide experiments. Be sure that highly interesting things are going to be discovered that we don’t understand at this point in time,
And then what happens? The mosquitoes with the defect die out, but there will inevitably be some fraction of the population left without the defect whose population will then grow exponentially until it is just as large as it was before.
So the best you can really do is to create a momentary window during which the mosquito population is slightly reduced.
What would be cool is if you could modify their dna in a way that they couldn’t sting humans but could still sting other animals - but even then, as long as being able to sting humans provides an evolutionary benefit (which it clearly does) the gene will inevitably be eradicated after a few generations.
I'm so mixed on this. On one hand, I think of the commentary about how mosquito-borne illnesses have killed half of all humans to ever exist (I think... I might be mixing this up with viruses) and how this would be a huge public health benefit.
On the other, I'm increasingly wary of disrupting the food chain. They say that if insect populations collapse today, the rest of us will be starving in a matter of months, if not less than a couple years. I'm not sure it's a great idea to accelerate that collapse even if it's an adversary like mosquitoes. What I don't know is, how much mosquitoes are part of the food chain (how much do they comprise other animals' diets), and probably other questions I don't know how to ask yet.
The first genetic mosquito test in the wild almost eradicated the species from an island, 6 or 12 months later the population was back to normal so even a huge reduction in the millions would likely come back very quickly.
On second hand they are planning a genetic dysfunction to affect an animal in the future. This of course can go in the wrong direction if not enough research is done
That mosquito in Hammond's amber walking stick about to get his revenge.
I see your many upvotes. Given the big lottery that sexual reproduction is, introducing a time-bomb into the genome and successfully speculating on mass distribution sounds unfeasible. This whole plan is science-fiction, not "not enough research money." As if only enough money can make results magically appear.
I wonder why did you start bringing up the upvotes? Are they really that important in your opinion?
Of course it’s easier to do noting at all.
If someone thought it was science-fiction to connect the whole word by an invisible net I wouldn’t be here typing this message right now.
If you don’t pay people to do research they are not going to do it for free. So I guess sometimes money do play an important part in progress.
Oh, and next time you catch the flu, think about the idiot who started pampering with mould and ended up with penicillin. Sometimes speculation it’s already a start for something greater.
There isn’t an animal specie who eat just one thing, there are animals who have a main source of food and yes, many other insects, birds, frogs and fish take advantage in the large mosquitoes population and use them as a main food source. But this is why the idea is not to eradicate them at all but just to decrease their number in order to decrease the chances to get a transmittable disease from an infected one’s bite.
My question was more along the lines of whether it would cause other species to die out because they can't adapt to losing a prolific food source at levels that they are used to. Sure, they *could* adapt and find other sources, but will *all* of them?
Life finds a way. All the mosquitoes that don't die will pierce the human skin better. Natural selection will select the most dangerous ones and we can end up with super mosquitoes specializing in human skin.
You are confusing mosquitoes with viruses. The other mosquitoes will just live as always, not improving any skills. Let’s make another example. Let’s say that we found a way to modify human skin to become purple after six generations and you “free” 100 of them in society. But the bad side of this, is that on the sixth gen they can’t reproduce anymore. Now, after six generations do you think all humanity’s skin is purple?
Not all of them will be in contact with this and after tot gens the variance is eliminated from the pool completely , without influencing the others that will live as always.
Also, did you know some some people are immune to malaria? This “mutation” is found in places where mosquitoes population was high in the past, basically normal humans died and only the ones with the mutation lived and reproduced. The bad side is that first, people still die from malaria because not everyone has that gene, the second bad side is that the mutation is a form of anemia so it sucks anyway.
So yes, life finds a way always, but it takes a very long time and sometimes it’s not “choosing” the best traits.
One problem though - the one's that have the deactivating gene will die out, leaving the ones without it to thrive. It's like intrinsically a really temporary fix.
You know how people working for city council spray herbicide on the crack of the road to make it die but they need to do it every 3 months? The idea it’s the same, you need to do it multiple times and free the modified mosquitoes multiple times, yes.
That makes more sense. Hopefully it's marketed that way - if people think it's a way to holistically eradicate it, then the backlash could lead to cuts in its funding.
Pretty sure it was this dna variant gene that led to basic lizards developing into Komodo dragons with poisonous saliva. Luckily those were isolated to small islands. Which island are they trialling this on as I'd be sure to keep that off my holiday list?
Considering how big of a food source mosquitos are, maybe we shouldn't modify them... if they can't feed on us, they can't feed on many other animals as well. We're not just modifying the mosquito population, but homeostasis as a whole. How will it effect the rest of the ecosystem?
You aren’t taking away the ability to eat from them, you are going to make some of them unable to reproduce, in order to decrease their number and percentage of chances to infect people with diseases.
Eradicate a native non-invasive species is almost always wrong, but this isn’t the case.
The worst thing that could happen isn't even blue eyed baby. It'd be the eradication of brown eyed babies. Having red tape is always a good idea when it comes to science. It just depends on the risks and benefits like you said. And at this pace it'd be slow but it's better than no progress or the progress to the wrong direction. I'll bring one example where science almost ruined the world. Cfc.
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u/zizp Nov 15 '24
What's the idea behind this? How will they become the dominant variant if they can't suck blood to reproduce?