Researchers have long been trying to get a bacteria into mosquitoes that would stop the spread of malaria, and they just made a big step toward this goal. A team led by Zhiyong Xi of Michigan State University in East Lansing injected Wolbachia bacteria into a lot of mosquitoes and was able to start a laboratory line of mosquitoes that have this bacteria in them, and are able to pass it down to their offspring. It does not get rid of all of the malaria bacteria, but it gets rid of most of the human infecting malaria.
NOS Themes:
-Role of Motivation: Researchers have been trying this experiment for many years, because they want to help save thousands of lives
-Importance of Repeatability: They repeated this thousands of times trying to see if they could get it to work.
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Mitchell Gardner
This is so interesting, espesially since maleria is such a problem in other parts of the world. I found another article conferming this expirement.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/05/09/scientists-infect-mosquitos-with-bacteria-to-curb-malaria-transmission/
I looked at the article and found it especially interesting that the bacteria has been passed down through 34 generations so far.
ReplyDeleteAnother nature of science theme I noticed is that Science is tentative. They can't release these mosquitoes with the bacteria back into the wild until they see how they block pathogens and compete for mates.