Scientists at Virginia Tech are one step closer to controlling a species of mosquito that carries deadly disease. It’s not a pesticide or repellant, it’s a gene that can literally change the gender of a mosquito from potentially deadly females to harmless males.
Sex matters in mosquitos, because it is females only which bite to nourish their young. That’s how they can spread disease. Bio Chemistry Professor Jake Tu is part of the team that discovered the elusive gene called NIX, which can change female mosquitos and their offspring into males.
Gene editing technology is opening up a whole new world for science. Entomologists at Virginia Tech are using it to find out exactly how mosquitos transmit deadly diseases to humans.
Most mosquito species do not transmit disease, but a few native to Africa, and now showing up in the southern U.S. do; Fatal diseases such as malaria, dengue fever and chikungunya. Those viruses kill hundreds of thousand of people each year, most of them children.
Sometimes it seems like so many new discoveries are being made, that it’s hard to keep up with all the new knowledge coming at us each day. Well, you have researchers to thank for that. People, who get curious about something, then make a plan to find out more.
The quest to transition to a hydrogen economy, where cars run on nearly emission- free fuel, faces many roadblocks. But a discovery by a team at Virginia Tech may help pave the way for cleaner burning vehicles.
Typically, hydrogen fuel for cars is made from natural gas. But Virginia Tech researchers have come up with a new way to make hydrogen from bio-mass, readily available plant leftovers such as corn husks or saw dust, with no need for fossil fuel in the process.