Small Pest, Big Battle

Science and Technology @ UCSB

The Aedes aegypti mosquito may be tiny but it can wreak major havoc on human health, spreading diseases such as Zika, dengue fever and yellow fever.Those little suckers are about to face the fight of their life.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) of the U.S. Department of Defense has awarded up to $14.9 million to a team of researchers from six University of California campuses, including biologist Craig Montell at UC Santa Barbara, to study how to use gene editing as a way to control disease-spreading mosquitoes.
Insects that carry disease represent one of the greatest worldwide threats to human health, with billions of people currently at risk of infection. Last year, more than 700 million people were infected with malaria or dengue fever, resulting in 440,000 deaths. And the prevalence of Zika virus is rising.
“Protecting the public from these diseases is difficult,” said Montell, the Patricia and Robert Duggan Professor of Neuroscience in UCSB’s Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, whose lab works with Aedes aegypti. “Vaccines to prevent the diseases either don’t exist or are not very effective, and current mosquito control methods are inadequate. Therefore, there is a critical need for a transformative, species-specific, safe and effective method to control mosquitoes.”
Called Safe Genes, the DARPA project will focus on a technique pioneered by two team members, Ethan Bier of UC San Diego and Anthony James of UC Irvine. Known as gene drive, it can spread desirable genes in wild populations or suppress harmful organisms. Gene drive has been discussed and studied for decades, but the recent discovery of the CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technique has revolutionized the development of gene drive systems, offering an increasingly inexpensive, efficient and more reliable way to make precise, targeted changes to the genome.
Advances in genetics and molecular biology will allow the UC researchers to ...

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