What animal kills more humans than any other? The answer is not rhinos, or tigers, or even sharks. The answer is the tiny mosquito, vector for the Plasmodium parasite that causes malaria.
Each year more than 600,000 people die from the mosquito-borne illness, despite interventions, including the use of insecticide sprays, vaccines, and insecticide-treated bed nets, that have reduced deaths from malaria by 50 percent in the last decade.
Unfortunately, mosquitos are developing resistance to insecticides, and drug-resistant parasites are emerging, threatening to reverse this recent progress.
Now, however, a team of researchers at University of California, San Diego, University of São Paulo, Johns Hopkins University, and University of California, Berkeley, have discovered a potential new tool in the fight against malaria. The results were described in a paper published last month in the journal Nature.
By changing a single amino acid in the mosquito’s genome, researchers created a mosquito ...
