Google parent company Alphabet Inc.’s research organization Verily has made great strides in an experimental program dedicated to wiping out disease-causing mosquitoes, according to a recently published paper.
Nearly two years after Verily released 14.4 million sterile male mosquitoes in Fresno County, California, as part of its “Debug Project,” the research organization is now reporting that its trials, which spanned from April 2018 through October 2018, were successful in suppressing more than 93% of the female mosquito population.
“We had a vision of what this should look like, and we managed to do that pretty perfectly,” Jacob Crawford, a senior scientist on the project, told Bloomberg.
This process, dubbed the “sterile insect technique” (SIT) takes advantage of the fact that female mosquitoes, on average, only mate once. If a female mosquito mates with a sterile male, the resulting eggs won’t hatch.
The particular mosquito used in Verily’s research is the primary disease vector of yellow fever, dengue, chikungunya and Zika.
In addition to Alphabet, Microsoft co-founder and billionaire Bill Gates has pledged to use his wealth to fight against malaria, another mosquito-borne disease. According to his annual mosquito release on his website, he is currently backing a CRISPR method approach to genetically edit mosquitoes, affecting their chromosomes and rendering their descendants unable to reproduce normally.
“Instead of killing a bunch of mosquitoes indiscriminately, we could eliminate only the dangerous ones,” Gates suggested in his article.
Sourse: sputniknews.com
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