Virginia Tech Scientists Streamline Genome-Editing Tool to Thwart 'Deadliest' Animal

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Newswise Life science researchers at Virginia Tech have accelerated a game-changing technology that's being used to study one of the planet's most lethal disease-carrying animals.

Writing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers revealed an improved way to study genes in mosquitoes using a genome-editing method known as CRISPR-Cas9, which exploded onto the life science scene in 2012.

Editing the genome of an organism allows scientists to study it by deleting certain genes to observe how the organism is affected, or even to add new genes. The new technique makes the editing process more efficient and may accelerate efforts to develop novel mosquito-control or disease-prevention strategies.

"We've cut the human capital it takes to evaluate genes in disease-carrying mosquitoes by a factor of 10," said Zach N. Adelman, an associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a member of the Fralin Life Science Institute. "Not a lot of research groups have the resources to spend four months working with up to 5,000 mosquito embryos to investigate a gene that may ultimately have no bearing on their work. Now they can potentially do the same investigation in a week."

Mosquitoes transmit pathogens that cause malaria, dengue fever, and other high-impact diseases. In 2013, Malaria killed an estimated 584,000 people, most of them young children, according to the World Health Organization. Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and a philanthropist who supports social and health causes, has called the mosquito the world's deadliest animal.

"The mosquito is incredibly important as far as transmission of disease," said Kevin M. Myles, an associate professor of entomology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences and a member of the Fralin Life Science Institute. "With this model, any scientist asking a question about a mosquito phenotype can now find its genetic cause. That's important for basic research into mosquito biology and applied research to control disease-vector mosquitoes."

The scientific community has long rallied to fight mosquito-borne diseases.

"I am excited by the paper," said Laura C. Harrington, a professor and the chairwoman of entomology at Cornell University, who was not involved in the research. "We are desperately in need of faster and more efficient ways to transform mosquitoes. This single hurdle is holding the entire field back from making the discoveries that will lead to novel and effective approaches to mosquito and, consequently, disease control."

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Virginia Tech Scientists Streamline Genome-Editing Tool to Thwart 'Deadliest' Animal