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Gene Drive Turns Mosquitoes Into Malaria Fighters

Slashdot: Science - Fetched: November 24th, 2015, 5:00am UTC

sciencehabit writes: The war against malaria has a new ally: a controversial technology for spreading genes throughout a population of animals. Researchers report today that they have harnessed a so-called gene drive to efficiently endow mosquitoes with genes that should make them immune to the malaria parasitemdash;and unable to spread it. On its own, gene drive won't get rid of malaria, but if successfully applied in the wild the method could help wipe out the disease, at least in some corners of the world. The approach "can bring us to zero [cases]," says Nora Besansky, a geneticist at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, who specializes in malaria-carrying mosquitoes. "The mosquitoes do their own work [and] reach places we can't afford to go or get to."pdiv class="share_submission" style="position:relative;" a class="slashpop" href="http://twitter.com/home?status=Gene+Drive+Turns+Mosquitoes+Into+Malaria+Fighters%3A+http%3A%2F%2Fbit.ly%2F1N5lErA"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/twitter_icon_large.png"/a a class="slashpop" href="http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=http%3A%2F%2Fscience.slashdot.org%2Fstory%2F15%2F11%2F23%2F2345203%2Fgene-drive-turns-mosquitoes-into-malaria-fighters%3Futm_source%3Dslashdot%26utm_medium%3Dfacebook"img src="http://slashcdn.com/sd/facebook_icon_large.png"/a a class="nobg" href="http://plus.google.com/share?url=http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/23/2345203/gene-drive-turns-mosquitoes-into-malaria-fighters?utm_source=slashdotamp;utm_medium=googleplus" onclick="javascript:window.open(this.href,'', 'menubar=no,toolbar=no,resizable=yes,scrollbars=yes,height=600,width=600');return false;"img src="http://www.gstatic.com/images/icons/gplus-16.png" alt="Share on Google+"//a /div/ppa href="http://science.slashdot.org/story/15/11/23/2345203/gene-drive-turns-mosquitoes-into-malaria-fighters?utm_source=rss1.0moreanonamp;utm_medium=feed"Read more of this story/a at Slashdot./pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~4/Bm5Ljfa6s3M" height="1" width="1" alt=""/

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