There are more than 3000 kinds of mosquitoes living on the earth. Female mosquitoes such as Aedes, Anopheles and Culex pipiens need a lot of nutrients during reproduction, so they will suck the blood of humans, and other animals.
If the vector mosquitoes suck blood containing viruses or pathogens, they bite humans, and these pathogens will spread between humans with the mosquitoes. The main mosquito-borne diseases include malaria, Zika fever, dengue fever , yellow Fever, filariasis.
mosquito-borne diseases have severely affected the survival of human beings. The number of people infected with mosquito-borne diseases each year is as high as 700 million people worldwide, and more than 1 million people are killed as a result. Because of this, scientists hope to find effective ways to control the number of mosquitoes and reduce the breeding and spread of mosquito-borne diseases.
According to a new study published in the journal "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B" (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B) [1], scientists at (Texas A&M University) at Texas A&M University have made a breakthrough. In the case of changing the mosquito's genome, the mosquito is gene-edited. This new technology can automatically delete the genetic changes in the mosquito's genome.
The genetic modification of mosquitoes is nothing new, and such research has been carried out all the time. Scientists use CRISPR gene editing technology to completely change the genes of mosquitoes, making them sterile, or their offspring will not survive the larval stage. Then, these transgenic mosquitoes are combined with mosquitoes in nature to achieve the purpose of controlling the number of mosquitoes.
The United States will start an experiment in 2021, and plans to release 750 million genetically modified mosquitoes on the island, hoping to wipe out the mosquitoes on the island. This move has been strongly opposed by hundreds of thousands of people, because people worry that genetically modified mosquitoes may bring unpredictable harm to the ecological environment, such as producing more dangerous mutant mosquitoes.
People have always been cautious about genetic modification technology. It is for this reason that scientists have proposed a new technology that allows genetic modification to be self-removed through coding, so that the modified gene will not persist in nature.
What if the mosquitoes are completely wiped out?
In view of the harm caused by mosquitoes, many people hope that mosquitoes will go extinct. After all, few creatures in nature only feed on mosquitoes, and no plants rely solely on mosquitoes for pollination, so after the complete extinction of mosquitoes, the ecosystem does not seem to be affected.
However, it is possible that other insects will emerge as a result, and they will replace the ecological niche previously occupied by mosquitoes, and the consequences of this are incalculable. In any case, human beings currently do not have the ability to completely eradicate this kind of insect that has lived on the earth for 230 million years, and the "struggle" against vector mosquitoes will continue for a long time.
References
[1] Josef Zapletal, Neda Najmitabrizi, Madhav Erraguntla, et al. Making gene drive biodegradable, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2021, doi: 10.1098/rstb.2019.0804.
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