遺伝子操作によるマラリアを媒介しないハマダラカの創出 : 新規マラリアコントロールへの挑戦

概要

論文の詳細を見る
Blood-sucking arthropods including mosquitoes, sand flies and ticks transmit numerous infectious agents during blood feeding. Amongst arthropodborn diseases, malaria transmitted by anopheline mosquitoes is the worst health problem in the world, and kills 1-2 million people, mostly African children, every year. The lack of an effective vaccine and the emergence of Plasmodium resistance to many existing antimalarial drugs have aggravated the situation. Therefore, the control of vector competence in malaria transmission has become a more important objective to be pursued. Recent advances in the genetic engineering of anopheline mosquitoes have raised hopes for their use as new strategies for malaria control and provided a powerful tool to investigate mosquito-parasite interactions. The interruption of the parasite cycle in the mosquito using transgenic strategies can occur at the midgut level, interfering with ookinete invasion or oocyst differentiation, and at the salivary gland level, blocking invasion of gland cells or the transmission of infective sporozoites from the salivary glands. We have established two kinds of transgenic mosquitoes expressing foreign genes at midguts or salivary glands. This review describes recent progress of our transgenic mosquito works. Our results open up the possibilities of elucidating mosquito-parasite interactions and generating transgenic mosquitoes refractory to parasites.
日本衛生動物学会の論文
2006-12-15