Tag Archives: biotechnology

super mosquitoes

According to the BBC, now mosquitoes can purposely be infected with a natural virus that out-competes Dengue fever:

The bacteria Wolbachia is found in 60% of insects. It acts like a vaccine for the mosquito which carries Dengue, Aedes Aegypti, stopping the Dengue virus multiplying in its body.

Wolbachia also has an effect on reproduction. If a contaminated male fertilises the eggs of a female without the bacteria, these eggs do not turn into larvae.

If the male and female are contaminated or if only a female has the bacteria, all future generations of mosquito will carry Wolbachia.

As a result, Aedes mosquitoes with Wolbachia become predominant without researchers having to constantly release more contaminated insects.

In Australia this happened within 10 weeks on average.

A statistic that caught my eye:

Brazil leads the world in the number of Dengue cases, with 3.2 million cases and 800 deaths reported in the 2009-2014 period.

Doing the math, that adds up to a death rate of 0.025%.

making chemotherapy “a thing of the past”

From the BBC, this caught my eye:

Prime Minister David Cameron has said it “will see the UK lead the world in genetic research within years”.

The first genetic codes of people with cancer or rare diseases, out of a target of 100,000, have been sequenced.

Experts believe it will lead to targeted therapies and could make chemotherapy “a thing of the past”…

The project has now passed the 100 genome mark, with the aim of reaching 1,000 by the end of the year and 10,000 by the end of 2015