The test mosquitoes have been spliced with an extra gene which prevents them from transmitting Plasmodium berghei, one of the common malarial parasites. Malaria currently kills up to three million people throughout the world annually, most of the them small children.
Researchers from the Johns Hopkins University have said in a paper published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS) that, not only will the modified mosquito resist infection by malaria but it will out-breed its wild cousins when feeding on malaria -infected blood.
Speaking on Australian radio, Associate Professor Jason Rasgon explained, "The malaria parasite itself can induce a fitness cost in the mosquitoes, and so we hypothesize that these mosquitoes that were modified to be resistant to the parasite would actually have a fitness advantage when fed on plasmodium-infected blood or malaria parasite-infected blood," he said to the Australian ABC.
However Professor Rasgon warns malaria must be fought on a number of fronts. "Release of genetically modified mosquitoes should never be seen as the silver bullet that's going to solve malaria," he said. "Even if we get to the point where we are ready to release these into natural populations, it'll have to be done in conjunction with a whole host of other types of malaria control strategies that we have in our arsenal, such as vaccines that those are developed, insecticides, drugs against the malaria parasite, and all this has to be used in a greater fashion."
