登革熱病媒蚊綜合治理.pptVIP

Gene breakthrough heralds better prospect for malaria solution Scientists have made a major breakthrough in understanding the genetics of the insect parasite that is being targeted by researchers as a way of preventing the spread of malaria. Wolbachia bacteria are parasites that infect as many as 80 per cent of the world’s insects and manipulate reproduction in their hosts in order to improve their own transmission. In species including the fruit fly and mosquito, they do this by altering the sperm of infected males to prevent them from successfully reproducing with uninfected females. Females infected with Wolbachia produce, on average, more offspring than uninfected females. This is because they can successfully mate with any male in the population, whereas uninfected females are restricted to uninfected males. As Wolbachia is maternally transmitted, this has the effect of spreading the infection through the insect population. Researchers around the world have secured millions in research funding to help develop malaria control strategies that use genetically modified Wolbachia that would spread through mosquito populations and carry genes that make their mosquito hosts unable to transmit the plasmodium parasite that cause malaria. For the first time, in new research published in the journal Genetics, scientists from the University of Bath (UK) and the University of Chicago (USA) have identified two of the genes that Wolbachia manipulates when it infects the fruit fly Drosophila simulans. “This is a major breakthrough in our understanding of the genetic basis of Wolbachia infection,” said Dr Ben Heath, from the Department of Biology Biochemistry at the University of Bath. “In recent years there has been great interest in using transgenic Wolbachia as a way of modifying natural populations of insects such as mosquitoes which transmit malaria. “However this would always be difficult to achieve without a full understanding of the genetics of how Wolbachia interacts