Bid to clip dengue mosquito wings

Experts Alter Genes To Breed Flightless Female Carriers

New Delhi: A mosquito can’t bite if it cannot fly? This is the theory that will guide the world’s latest fight against dengue. American and British researchers have jointly developed a strain of flightless mosquito that they believe will help curb the spread of dengue.
    The dengue virus is spread through the bite of infected female Aedes aegypti. Scientists from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the University of Oxford and Oxitec Limited in the UK anticipate that flightless Aedes aegypti female will die quickly in the wild, thus cutting down the number of mosquitoes, reducing spread of dengue and eventually even eliminating it.
    Using methods designed by Dr Luke Alphey of Oxitec, a medical technology firm, the researchers genetically engineered the Aedes aegypti so that wing muscles don’t develop properly in female offspring rendering them unable to fly. Males do not inherit the defect: they can fly as normal. But interestingly, they don’t bite.
    The idea is to introduce genetically altered males into the wild. When these transgenic males mate with wild females, they pass on the gene and the females of the next generation are rendered flightless. So how exactly did the scientists create this breed? Speaking to TOI in an exclusive interview, Oxitec’s Luke Alphey said, “We inserted a small piece of DNA into the insect’s genome. This led to a slight disruption of the mosquito’s flight muscles, thereby making it unable to fly. But we were able to make this affect females only.”