Virus That Affects Mosquitoes May Offer New Malaria Strategy

Editor's Choice
Main Category: Infectious Diseases / Bacteria / Viruses
Article Date: 23 Aug 2008 - 0:00 PDT

email to a friend   printer friendly   view / write opinions   rate article

Mosquitoes are known for transmitting deadly viruses to humans, but the insects themselves are susceptible to viral infection. According to a study published in the open-access journal PLoS Pathogens, researchers at Johns Hopkins University have described a virus that infects the mosquito best known for transmitting malaria - Anopheles gambiae. Malaria kills over one million people worldwide every year, and the researchers believe that the infectious mosquito virus might be used to control malaria by passing on new genetic information to A. gambiae.

AgDNV is a densonucleosis virus (densovirus) - a type common to mosquitoes and other insects but not infectious to humans and other vertebrates. The AgDNV virus does not actually harm mosquitoes, but researchers believe it is highly infectious to larvae and is easily passed to the adults.

Researcher Jason Rasgon, PhD (Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health's Malaria Research Institute) notes that this new finding came about while the investigators were actually trying to use Wolbachia bacteria to infect An. gambiae mosquito cells. Co-author Xiaoxia Ren was analyzing the gel used to detect the bacteria when an "artifact" that appeared as an unexpected prominent band in the gel was noticed.

Ragson admits that, "Finding artifacts such as this one during experiments is not uncommon, but we decided to investigate this one further since we kept observing it over and over. When we sequenced it, we were surprised to learn that we had found a new virus."

The researchers believe that the virus can be altered to kill the mosquito or make it incapable of transmitting malaria. In order to test how much control the authors had over the virus, the altered the AgDNV so that adult mosquitoes presented a harmless green fluorescent protein that is spotted using a microscope.

"In theory, we could use this virus to produce a lethal toxin in the mosquito or instruct the mosquito to die after 10 days, which is before it can transmit the malaria parasite to humans. However, these concepts are many years away," concludes Rasgon.

Viral Paratransgenesis in the Malaria Vector Anopheles gambiae
Ren X, Hoiczyk E, Rasgon JL
PLoS Pathogens (2008). 4(8):e1000135.
doi:10.1371/journal.ppat.1000135
Click Here to View Article

About PLoS Pathogens

PLoS Pathogens (www.plospathogens.org) publishes outstanding original articles that significantly advance the understanding of pathogens and how they interact with their host organisms. All works published in PLoS Pathogens are open access. Everything is immediately available subject only to the condition that the original authorship and source are properly attributed. Copyright is retained by the authors. The Public Library of Science uses the Creative Commons Attribution License.

About the Public Library of Science

The Public Library of Science (PLoS) is a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource. For more information, visit http://www.plos.org

Written by: Peter M Crosta
Copyright: Medical News Today
Not to be reproduced without permission of Medical News Today