There are a number of issues surrounding zikaviruset and experts around the world are now trying to find answers to. One is about Zika really behind the large number of cases of children born with the malformation microcephaly. How to find ways to stop or at least slow, the spread of infection is another important issue. Now lift two American scientists developed a method they think may be possible, writes The Guardian.
READ MORE: Zika – everything you need to know about zikavirus
Zikaviruset – method developed in Umeå
According to them, one could try to change the mosquitoes gender, by making use of the method crispr / Cas9, partly developed at Umeå University and the journal Science named last year’s largest scientific breakthrough. The method, which is often likened to a “genetic knife”, could perhaps turn on a particular gene that makes female embryos develop male sex organs, according to the researchers. The idea is that the property is inherited and get mosquitoes in a population dying out, then it is the bloodsucking females that spread the infection.
But Olle Terenius, researchers at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, thinks it all sounds too risky.
– to have such a “death gene” switched on, as you let go completely free, I think that’s a little scary, he said.
“it feels like a safer way to go “
the problem is that one can not guarantee that the mosquitoes do not spread throughout the world. It could lead to the entire species wiped out, which could have unforeseen consequences.
– The probability that one can keep the genetically modified mosquitoes in one place it is enough in theory, but not in reality. Then you have to ask whether you can delete this mosquito from the ecosystem.
Olle Terenius think instead on the possibility of using the method to spread the genes that make the mosquitoes can not carry on some viruses, but that for the sake of it needs to die out.
– It seems like a safer way to go if we are to make use of crispr / Cas9, he said.
READ MORE: Anna base: most Swedes do not need to be concerned about the zikaviruset
Microcephaly control
What priority efforts to reduce the spread of Zika will depend on whether it really is the virus behind-microcephaly cases, says Tomas Bergström, professor of clinical virology at the University of Gothenburg.
– the big topic of discussion in virology is if it causes microcephaly or not, and where opinion is divided. If there is such a connection, then other viruses worse. But it gives microcephaly, then you have really no stone unturned. It will determine the effort.
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