Mosquitoes are transsexuals
Geneticists have learned to turn female mosquitoes into non-biting males
American scientists have proved that changing just one gene turns female mosquitoes into males who do not bite and are not able to transmit dangerous infections to people. The results of the study are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Aryan et al., Nix alone is sufficient to convert female Aedes aegypti into fertile males and myo-sex is needed for male flight).
Biologists from Virginia Polytechnic University, in collaboration with colleagues from Texas A&M University, studied yellow-boredom Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the females of which are carriers of dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever, Zika virus, and some other dangerous diseases. Males of this species are not dangerous, as they do not bite.
The researchers paid special attention to the analysis of the dominant locus in one of the pairs of chromosomes – the M-locus, which determines the male sex.
"The presence of the M-locus determines the male sex, it's like a human Y chromosome," the press release says. The words of the head of the study Zhijian Tu (Zhijian Tu), professor of the Department of Biochemistry in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
By inserting the Nix gene – a previously discovered male defining gene in the Aedes aegypti M-locus – into a chromosomal region inherited by women, scientists have shown that this alone is enough to turn females into fertile – able to produce offspring – males with characteristic male gene expression.
First, the authors created and characterized many transgenic mosquito lines that expressed an additional copy of the Nix gene.
"We found that Nix-mediated sexual transformation is pervasive and stable for many generations in the laboratory, which means that these characteristics will be inherited by future generations," explains another author of the study, Michelle Anderson.
However, the genetically modified mosquitoes could not fly, as they did not inherit the myo-sex gene, also located at the M-locus.
"It turned out that the second gene, called myo-sex, was necessary for males to fly. This indicates the complexity of the molecular function of the M-locus containing at least thirty genes," notes the first author of the article Azadeh Aryan from the laboratory of Zhijian Tu.
Scientists note that in order to create stable transgenic lines that turn female mosquitoes into prolific flying males, additional research is needed to determine how to include the Nix and myo-sex genes in the genome together. According to the authors, this may be crucial for the development of mosquito control methods.
"Our method has great potential for developing strategies to control mosquitoes by reducing vector populations through sex conversion or by sterilizing insects," emphasizes James Biedler from the Franklin Institute of Life Sciences at Virginia Polytechnic University.
So far, scientists have been targeting only one species of mosquito that poses the greatest threat to humans, but in the future they are ready to extend their results to other species. The authors note that they found the Nix gene in all Aedes mosquitoes.
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