Researchers at Virginia Tech have found that they can turn female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes into males by tweaking a single gene ‘Nix’ in their DNA.
Male mosquitoes do not bite and are unable to transmit pathogens to humans. Female mosquitoes, on the other hand, are able to bite. Female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes require blood to produce eggs, making them the prime carriers of the pathogens that cause Zika and dengue fever in humans.
“The presence of a male-determining locus (M locus) establishes the male sex in Aedes aegypti and the M locus is only inherited by the male offspring, much like the human Y chromosome,” said ZhijianTu, a professor in the Department of Biochemistry in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, lead author of the study describing the process. “By inserting Nix, a previously discovered male-determining gene in the M locus of Aedes aegypti, into a chromosomal region that can be inherited by females, we showed that Nix alone was sufficient to convert females to fertile males. This may have implications for developing future mosquito control techniques.”
“Nix-mediated sex conversion was found to be highly penetrant and stable over many generations in the laboratory, meaning that these characteristics will be inherited for generations to come,” said Michelle Anderson, a former member of the Adelman and Tu labs and currently a senior research scientist at the Pirbright Institute in the United Kingdom.
“Nix has great potential for developing mosquito control strategies to reduce vector populations through female-to-male sex conversion, or to aid in the Sterile Insect Technique, which requires releasing only nonbiting males,” said James Biedler, a research scientist in the Tu lab.
Written by Tripti Tomar
