Beating back malaria

Researchers hope to breed mosquitoes which are not infected by malaria, in hopes that these, spreading through the wild, will displace the infectable ones. No infected mosquitoes means no infected people. Similarly, fewer infected mosquitoes should mean fewer cases.

They were able to get a gene to spread to half the population in several different (captive) environments. That's good; other groups have developed some malaria-resistant mosquito strains. One can hope.

There's a slight fly in the ointment, though--minor compared to the hope of getting rid of malaria, but not entirely trivial: Unless the gene gives the mosquito an advantage, the gene will likely disappear. Better mosquitoes?

The group thinks they found a way around this; they use a (already known) gene that makes a chemical which, when the cell repair machinery starts up, cuts at that site on the DNA and uses the location as a template. So the gene always winds up present, no matter how the gametes divide. So we don't get super-mosquitoes. One can hope.