Please help CantonRep.com serve you better by providing the following anonymous informatio... Modified Mosquitoes May Take a B

Yes, under fluorescent bulbs, some of the mosquitoes at the Johns Hopkins Malaria Research Institute will glow bright red or green. When magnified, they look like space aliens.

Rasgon and a team of Hopkins researchers have become international celebrities since they published a report highlighting the survival skills of their designer strain of Anopheles stephensi -- an otherwise common mosquito genetically engineered to resist mouse malaria.

Over several months, their enhanced mosquitoes had a higher survival rate than nonresistant strains that fed on the same diet of malaria-infected mouse blood.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that it might be possible to genetically design a mosquito that can not only survive outdoors but also out-compete and replace the breeds that spread malaria and kill up to 2.7 million people a year worldwide.

The release of an anti-malarial designer mosquito is many years away. But experts say the findings validate the concept of attacking malaria by genetically modifying the insect that spreads it.

``It's definitely important work,'' said Ken Olson, a virologist at Colorado State University who has created a genetically modified mosquito that he hopes will replace breeds that spread dengue fever.

Researchers first showed in 2002 that inserting a peptide into the genome of the same family of Anopheles stephensi made it resistant to mouse malaria.

The gene, known as SM1, prevents the malaria parasite from penetrating the mosquito's midgut and reaching the salivary glands -- a necessary step for transmitting malaria in a mosquito bite.

Many of the questions came from an international press corps fascinated by the development of a genetically modified insect. While genetically altered animals and plants might pass as curiosities in the United States, the European public takes them more seriously -- and often regards them as threats.

The lead author of the study, Marcelo Jacobs-Lorena, a veteran Hopkins mosquito expert, was in Sweden when the story broke and unavailable for interviews. That left Rasgon, a 32-year-old co-author who came to Hopkins 2 1/2 years ago, to explain things to the world.

Many international news accounts describe the mosquitoes as having eyes that glow, and Web images show them with their eyes glowing bright green from fluorescent lights.

The fluorescent eyes are a minor detail to the researchers -- the result of a routine genetic tag inserted into the mosquito's eggs so researchers can tell the transgenic mosquitoes from the wild types.

``It's not a new concept,'' said Adriana Costero, a program officer for the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases that partially funded the Hopkins study. The government has funded transgenic mosquito research for 15 years, she said.

The work is one of several ongoing malaria research efforts. In another approach, researchers at the Center for Vaccine Development at the University of Maryland School of Medicine published a study in April identifying proteins on the surface of a malaria parasite that could be instrumental in creating a vaccine.

Improved housing, sanitation and mosquito-control efforts effectively eradicated malaria in the United States by the late 1940s, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But in Africa and Asia the disease remains a major killer, prompting scientists to focus on the genetics of both mosquitoes and their parasites.

``The adult human immune system adapts, so infected adults don't die as readily, but young children under 5 and pregnant women are the most vulnerable,'' said Sarah Volkman, a molecular biologist at the Harvard School of Public Health.

For the study, the researchers put an equal number of their transgenic mosquitoes in glass cages with wild-type mosquitoes and let them feed on malaria-infected mice for several weeks.

After nine generations -- a period of several months -- the researchers found that their genetically modified insects laid more eggs and had a higher survival rate and made up 70 percent of the population.

For starters, the researchers used a malaria parasite that infects mice, not humans. And even if researchers find a mosquito gene that prevents transmission of the human malaria parasites, there's still no mechanism to ensure that the desired gene will pass on to enough members of subsequent generations to make it a deterrent.

Rasgon also knows that releasing a genetically modified insect into the wild will raise environmental concerns in areas of the world that are highly suspicious of such research.

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