
Scientists create new strain of malaria-blocking mosquito - astaroth360
http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/uc-scientists-create-malaria-blocking-mosquitoes
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nonbel
Wow, this article fails to link, and the Nature editorial[1] has a failed
link. Here is the paper:
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/18/1521077112.abst...](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/18/1521077112.abstract)

[1] [http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-
engineered-...](http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered-
to-fight-malaria-1.18858)

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nonbel
>"A total of 680 G0 wild-type embryos of the Indian strain of An. stephensi
(15) was injected with a solution... A total of 122 and 129 adult males and
females, respectively (37%), survived to the adult stage. Adults were assigned
to 22 male-founder and 9 female-founder pools and outcrossed to wild-type
adults of the opposite sex. Two males positive for DsRed fluorescence
(DsRed+), designated 10.1 and 10.2, were recovered following screening of
25,712 G1 larvae. [...] G0 males and females were outcrossed to wild-type
mosquitoes in pools of ∼5 G0 males or 15–30 G0 females. All G1, G2, G3, and G4
progeny were screened as larvae for DsRed fluorescence"

So they started with 680 embryos they attempted to modify. Out of these,
251/680 survived (what is normal survival to adulthood?). They do not report
whether these had red eyes, what the sequences were, etc. But then they mated
these with normal mosquitoes (0% red eyes in the WT? They don't say) and saw
that 2/25712 (~1 in 10,000) of the offspring had red eyes. They also show
blots containing a single technical replicate from each of the two red-eyed
mosquitoes that indicate both normal and edited genes were present.

Everything else is based on further analysis of progeny from these two
mosquitoes (which were one generation removed from the gene modification
step). There is very little info here regarding what happened during the
initial steps. Also, I see no mention of blinding. I wonder if this can be
explained some other way.

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ape4
So a super mosquito... humm.

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dang
Url changed from [http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/24/health/malaria-mosquito-
strain...](http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/24/health/malaria-mosquito-strain/),
which points to this.

