Published: 21st Sep, 2021
Context
CRISPR-based genetic engineering researchers have created a “precision-guided sterile insect technique” (pgSIT), a system that restrains populations of mosquitoes that infect millions each year with debilitating diseases.
What is Precision-guided sterile insect technique (pgSIT)?
- It is a new scalable genetic control system that uses a CRISPR-based approach to engineer deployable mosquitoes that can suppress populations.
- Males don't transmit diseases so the idea is to release more and more sterile males.
- The precision-guided sterile insect technique alters genes linked to male fertility and female flight in Aedes aegypti.
- Aedes aegypti is the species responsible for spreading diseases including dengue fever, chikungunya and Zika.
- The envisioned pgSIT system could be implemented by deploying eggs of sterile males and flightless females at target locations where mosquito-borne disease spread is occurring.
- The system is self-limiting and is not predicted to persist or spread in the environment.
- Once the pgSIT eggs are released in the wild, sterile pgSIT males will emerge and eventually mate with females, driving down the wild population as needed.
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Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)
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