mosquito in Tanzania, 2009. Credit: Muhammad Mahdi Karim/Wikimedia Commons, GNU 1.2.
A new year means new beginnings. But for the residents of Florida Keys, a small archipelago off Florida’s coast, the dawn of 2021 seems to portend ill winds.
In August 2020, the local government approved a plan to release 750 million genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes. A British biotech company named Oxitec has planned to execute this release over two years. However, over 236,000 people have signed a petition against this decision because they fear the unknown long-term effects of releasing GM mosquitoes in the environment.
Oxitec’s foray in the US followed a decade of trial runs in the Cayman Islands and in Brazil. On its website, the company showcases publications spanning two decades.
A biotech fast-forward button for evolution is on the horizon. Researchers say they have used a novel genetic engineering method to create several new species of fruit fly in the lab for the first time an achievement which might help put a future without malaria and other insect-borne diseases within reach.
The approach, called synthetic speciation, could prove useful in creating safer pest-control technologies, says Maciej Maselko, a postdoctoral fellow studying synthetic biology at Macquarie University. In one far-off scenario, according to Maselko, synthetic speciation might even be applied to generate designer organisms that could pollinate plants or even detect landmines. Maselko and his team published their findings September 8 in Nature Communications.