Skip to main content

GM Mosquitoes #2

In the previous post, GM Mosquitoes #1  we had seen about the GM mosquitoes used for curing malaria. Now, we are gonna see about the GM mosquitoes designed for eradicating mosquitoes population!

Aedes aegypti is the mosquito species which spreads Dengue. Nowadays, people are suffering severely because of this Dengue. In most cases it just leaves with mild fever. But, in some cases, Dengue is deadly! So, to get rid of this great dengue nuisance, scientists had found a solution - GM mosquitoes!

We had seen that in the case of eradication of malaria by GM mosquitoes that scientists had made the mosquitoes resistant to malaria causing protist, but, here in this case of dengue the genetic modification is different.

Dengue!
In the case of dengue, male mosquitoes are made sterile and when they mate with the wild type female mosquitoes, their young ones are made unviable i.e they die before reaching adult stage. So, this reduces the population of mosquitoes by the death of new born young mosquitoes. (they use male ones as they don't bite and feed only plant products)

How the sterile males are made?

  • In one case, they say they are injecting an artificial gene into the male mosquitoes which makes them sterile.
  • In the other case, the male mosquitoes are exposed to gamma rays which causes mutation and makes the males sterile!
Positives!
If this works out, the number of dengue victims will sharply come down. Moreover, you won't be bitten much!

Note: there is no medicine available for curing dengue.

Drawbacks!
  • Think, how harder it would be to separate male from female mosquitoes? This is the major disadvantage. :'(
  • Sudden elimination of one species may suddenly pave way for something worse ever! :(
  • If something goes wrong with this gamma ray mutation, even deadly species can come out! :O
Know this too!
  • Reports and articles I read says that already they had released these GM mosquitoes in the cayman islands.
  • Oxitec is the biotechnology company which is working on the production of this GM mosquitoes.
  • India (where i'm from) is also planning to use this technique for eradicating mosquitoes and reduce the number of dengue victims. 
Ethics!
After all, the Government or concerned authorities before releasing the GM mosquitoes into the environment, must inform the people living over there. Must get their feed backs! 

Releasing the GM mosquitoes with out prior information, won't be fine! This may lead to various ethical problems!

Just imagine!
They use males as they don't bite us (if they are biting us, then they won't try this at all, because we are always cautious that we would be affected) what if they affect plants? You  see, not a single mosquito is going to sit over a plant, when many mosquitoes sit and feed from plants, is it possible that they might affect the plants. Inturn, when we feed those plants, we will be getting affected?

Just I imagined this last paragraph, It's silly?  :)

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Lowry Assay Principle and procedure

Though there are several protein assays available, the most preferred one in many laboratories is "Lowry assay". It is effective in the concentration range of 0.01 mg/ml to 1 mg/ml. And, as an additional info, the paper published describing the procedure and principle of Lowry Assay is the most cited paper in the scientific history. (Feeling like, "Wow! I want to publish one to compete with Oliver.H. Lowry"???  :P) Why Lowry?   Though there are several other protein assays, mostly Lowry assay is used in many laboratories. The reasons for preferring Lowry are: sensitivity of the assay, highly reproducible, cost effective, easy to perform. Biuret assay is generally used for higher protein concentrations like tissue samples but, Lowry for less concentrated samples and hence used in most of the molecular biology laboratories where there will be need for assaying comparatively less concentrated protein samples (in most cases where we attempt to produce enzymes). Oth...
Post a Comment
Read more

Sea Butterfly!

Neih hou!  Don't roll you eyes wondering what it is! "Neih hou" is how you say "hello" in Cantonese. Guess what, I am in Hong Kong and therefore the language Cantonese. I came to Hong Kong this summer as an intern before officially joining as a PhD Student. This is my second experience abroad, far away from home, new language, new culture, I expected me to have a "really" bad cultural shock, but, actually I experienced only 50% of what I expected. For a girl who have used the marina beach only for eating "sundal", bikini in beach was a shock (FEEL FREE TO JUDGE ME!). The first time, I went to the big wave beach here, I was the only one who was totally covered, when everyone was enjoying their Beer, I was slowly sipping my lemon juice (THE ODD ONE OUT!). I realized how beautifully different the world outside is! There is no single standard for right or wrong, it varies in different countries, in different regions around the world. And it ...
11 comments
Read more

The Butterfly flew for the first time!

Hi dear sweet lovely reader, Didn't meet you for a long time... Just after complaining about the stipend problem in the last post, I actually wanted to write a lot here, but, couldn't find time (Such a lazy girl, I am!). As you might be knowing, the author (me) is the butterfly here :P And, I flew for the first time!! YEAH! I FLEW! I flew like a butterfly! It was an awesome experience flying for the very first time! (ow, no! I dint put a trans-gene in my body and fly after getting  a pair of wings, but with a passport and VISA). I'm this girl, full of dreams wishing to do "this", "that" and "all kind of stuffs that one can do". And, one among those dreams was to fly one day! TO FLY FREE!(I mean, not free of cost :P, but liberation) I always wanted to fly in those big, big airplanes, but, I always have avoided that mode of transport. Reason? Obviously, it would burn a big hole in my dad's pocket (actually he can afford if I wan...
10 comments
Read more