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Australian scientists engineer ‘toxic male’ mosquitoes to combat deadly diseases | Male mosquitoes are being genetically modified to produce spider and sea anemone venom.
Current methods for genetic biocontrol of insect pests (e.g. gene drives) take generations to reduce harm. Here, authors engineered male fruit flies to express venom proteins in their seminal fluid that reduce female lifespan after mating, demonstrating a rapid approach to sustainable pest control.
However, all current mating-based genetic biocontrol technologies function by releasing engineered males which skew sex-ratios or reduce offspring viability in subsequent generations which leaves mated females to continue to cause harm (e.g. transmit disease). We systematically varied these parameters across defined ranges (see Methods) and assessed their impact on the percentage difference in cumulative blood-feeding events between TMT and fsRIDL simulations, serving as a proxy for their capacity to rapidly reduce the spread of disease (Fig. The model is not spatially explicit, but instead assumes a homogenous, randomly mixing population of a size for which the major limiting factor (in the absence of extrinsic effects such as predation or fluctuations in temperature and precipitation) is density-dependent mortality (DDM) of the early life stages (eggs and first and second instar larvae) 75.
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