The US Environmental Protection Agency has approved laboratory grown mosquitoes infected with the bacterium Wolbachia pipientis to be released into the wilds of 20 US states and Washington, DC. The mosquitoes are engineered by the company MosquitoMate so that they deliver the bacterium to wild mosquitoes when released, killing off insects that could transmit viruses such as dengue, yellow fever and Zika.
The technique is a riff on an approach used to manage agricultural pests for more than half a century known as "sterile insect technique". Using radiation to randomly cause an insect's genes to mutate, scientists made problematic species such as the screwworm unable to produce viable offspring. By 1982, screwworm was completely eradicated from the US.
Mosquitoes, though, are too fragile to blast with rays of radiation and still be capable of mating in the wild, forcing scientists to turn to other techniques such as genetic engineering or, in this case, the Wolbachia bacterium.
The company will rear the infected mosquitoes in its Kentucky lab, sorting non-biting males from females. Then those males will be released at treatment sites to mate with wild females, producing eggs that don't hatch because the virus prevents paternal chromosomes from developing properly.
The idea is that over time, as more male mosquitoes are released to mate with wild females, the population dwindles - without having to resort to pesticides that are not only harmful to people and the environment, but rapidly dwindling in efficacy.
This development will significantly reduce the mosquito population, even temporarily; can greatly reduce in spread of these diseases—it’s partly how we rid the US of malaria. With researchers anticipating new insect-spread diseases to continue to emerge, perfecting this kind of technology has the potential to save lives. But first, they need to prove it works.
The news was reported first on Tuesday in Nature, said the EPA said that on November 3 the agency officially registered MosquitoMate's Asian Tiger mosquito as a new biopesticide, with a five-year licence to sell in 20 different US states.
