Buzz Light

The unwelcome buzzing of a mosquito in a dark bedroom is enough to make anyone wish the pesky bugs glowed in the dark and could be easily spotted. An experiment with Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, carriers of viruses including dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, introduced male mosquitoes genetically modified to produce a fluorescent glow to populations in large outdoor cages. Modified males also carried a key mutation that caused their offspring to die. The larvae from these males (pictured) were easily identified under a fluorescence microscope, helping to monitor the efficiency of the approach and illustrate that the modified genes weren’t persisting in the population longer than a single generation. Addition of the modified males caused the elimination of the test populations within 10–15 weeks, suggesting that this approach could reduce Aedes aegypti numbers in the wild, and keep various viruses under control.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image by Prabhakargouda B Patil, Bharat Char and Usha B Zehr
• Research by Prabhakargouda B. Patil and colleagues, Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Pvt. Ltd., Jalna, India
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases, May 2022