Goodbye, snappers?
Genetically modified mosquitoes released in Florida
In Florida, the biotech company Oxitec has launched a plan to combat the spread of diseases with the help of genetically modified mosquitoes.
At the end of April, Oxitec for the first time placed its blue-and-white hexagonal containers on the plots of six private volunteer owners in the Florida Keys archipelago at the southern tip of the peninsula. After water was poured into the containers, larvae began to develop from the eggs of genetically modified mosquitoes located there. Now the first generation of larvae has turned into adult male mosquitoes and scattered around the neighborhood. In the next three months, their number will increase by about 12 thousand per week.
Mosquitoes belong to the species Aedes aegypti, known for spreading about three dozen diseases, including dengue fever, chikungunya, yellow fever and Zika virus fever. In male mosquitoes Aedes aegypti, whose genome was worked on by Oxitec specialists, has a gene that causes early death of female offspring. As a result, these mosquitoes mate with females, but their larvae die before they have time to grow to the stage of an adult mosquito, when the insect begins to drink blood and becomes a potential vector of diseases. The male larvae will partially grow into mosquitoes, among whose descendants there will be both males and females, and partially into those who will give only female offspring. In tests conducted in the Brazilian state of Bahia, the number of mosquitoes using this method decreased by 95%. Now, for the first time, genetically modified mosquitoes have been released into nature in the United States.
Although some opponents of the experiment have expressed concern about the environmental impact of removing one species of mosquito, their opponents point out that Aedes aegypti is only about four percent of the mosquito population in the Florida Keys and that there are many other species of mosquitoes that perform the same functions in local ecosystems. "Oxitec is not trying to destroy all mosquitoes. The company gets rid of one type of mosquito in a certain population in order to stop the transmission of pathogens to humans," says Omar Akbari, a molecular biologist at the University of California, San Diego. – Here is a kind of mosquitoes Aedes aegypti is invasive and does not play a role in this environment. Therefore, I do not think that removing this species from the environment will have any negative impact."
The company has been waiting for official approval of this project for about ten years. Critics have expressed concern that Oxitec does not publish any data on the reduction of morbidity. Those who oppose the release of modified mosquitoes have even threatened to disrupt the experiment by spraying insecticide in Oxitec containers. But the program received sufficient support, and there were even more people willing to place containers on their territory than the company expected.
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