Submitted by Christine Alexander on Tue, 08/12/2015 - 14:45
In their new paper, the Target Malaria consortium describe the use of CRISPER-CAS9 as a gene drive system to drive inheritance of mutated female fertility genes through Anopheles gambiae populations. If this proof of concept can be successfully transferred to the field, it has the potential to substantially reduce the transmission of malaria.
This research was led by Austin Burt at Imperial College London. Here in Cambridge, Steve Russell's Group have been involved in the consortium for over 10 years, and for this paper they developed a computational approach to identify candidate female fertility genes in Anopheles.
Read the paper at >> http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3439.html