Hi, Scientists
I would like to share this exciting news. This morning I got RSS feeds from labslink.com. Hopefully, it is helpful for you.
The mosquitoes that transmit malaria to humans were seen as public enemies, and campaigns to eradicate the disease focused on eliminating the mosquitoes. But, as a study published Oct 2 in Science shows, the mosquitoes can also be our allies in the fight against this common foe, which kills almost one million people a year and heavily impairs the economies of affected countries. Malaria parasites must spend part of their lives inside mosquitoes and another part inside humans, so by learning how mosquitoes resist malaria, we may find new tools for controlling its transmission to humans in endemic areas.the whole DNA – of Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes, a major carrier of the parasite that causes the most severe form of human malaria in Africa. They focused on the mosquitoes' resistance to a commonly used model organism: Plasmodium berghei, a parasite that causes malaria in rodents. When they compared the genomes of mosquitoes that could resist this infection to those of mosquitoes that couldn't, the scientists discovered that the major difference lies in a single section of one chromosome. Of the roughly 975 genes contained in this section of DNA, one in particular appears to play an important role in determining a mosquito's resistance to malaria. This gene, called TEP1, encodes a protein which was known to bind to and promote the killing of Plasmodium berghei malaria parasites in the mosquito's midgut, and the scientists discovered that their strain of resistant mosquitoes had a form, or allele, of TEP1, that was different from those found in non-resistant (or susceptible) strains.
