Latest news with #geneticengineering
The Independent
05-06-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Scientists develop STD that could wipe out mosquitoes
Scientists have developed genetic tools and a "sexually transmitted disease" using a deadly fungus to combat disease-carrying mosquitoes, primarily targeting females – which are responsible for biting – to reduce their lifespan and fertility. The fungus, Metarhizium, is sprayed on male mosquitoes and produces neurotoxins that kill females, while also making the mosquitoes more susceptible to insecticides. Scientists have also been able to genetically alter male mosquitoes to produce venom proteins in their semen that can reduce the lifespan of females. Mosquitoes, while serving as a food source and pollinators, are the world's deadliest animal, responsible for transmitting diseases like malaria, West Nile virus, and eastern equine encephalitis. Bioethicists and environmental philosophers have raised concerns about the ecological impact of potentially eradicating mosquitoes, considering their role in ecosystems and the broader biodiversity crisis.
BBC News
04-06-2025
- Health
- BBC News
BBC Learning English - Learning English from the News / Woolly mice: Are woolly mammoths next?
(Photo via Colossal Biosciences) ____________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________________ The story Scientists have created a genetically modified mouse that's woolly. The researchers plan to use their woolly mouse to test out other genetic changes before they try to create genetically-altered, mammoth-like elephants in the future. The company, Colossal Biosciences, hope to use the new mammoths in the fight against global warming. Critics say the project is unethical and mainly an attempt to gain publicity. News headlines Woolly mice are a first step to resurrecting mammoths, but there's a very long way to go The Conversation Colossal CEO Ben Lamm says humanity has a 'moral obligation' to pursue de-extinction tech TechCrunch Do not be bamboozled by the new fluffy mouse Key words and phrases resurrect give something life again The actor has been trying to resurrect his career since his last film received terrible reviews. moral obligation a feeling that you have to do something because it is considered to be right I volunteer at a soup kitchen for homeless people – for me, it feels like a moral obligation. bamboozled tricked I got bamboozled by the car salesman and bought a more expensive model than I needed. Next If you like learning English from the news, click here.
The Independent
04-06-2025
- Health
- The Independent
Ethical questions swarm scientists after discovery that could wipe out pesky mosquitoes
Scientists have developed methods to wipe potentially disease-carrying mosquitoes off of the face of the Earth. But, should they? The implications of such a monumental call remain unknown and bioethicists say they are not 'in favor of remaking the world to suit human desires.' 'The eradication of the mosquito through a genetic technology would have the potential to create global eradication in a way that just felt a little risky,' Christopher Preston, a University of Montana environmental philosopher, recently told The Washington Post. However, we have the technology, which largely targets the female mosquitoes responsible for biting and spreading malaria, dengue, Zika, and other nasty pathogens. Using genetic tools, researchers can edit the genetic makeup of mosquitoes and make the females infertile. In January, scientists in Australia that they were able to alter male mosquitoes to produce venom proteins in their semen that can reduce the lifespan of females. This week, researchers at the University of Maryland said they have successfully created a 'sexually transmitted disease' that would deliver a deadly fungal infection to the females. 'It's essentially an arms race between the mosquitoes and us,' University of Maryland professor Raymond St. Leger said in a statement. 'Just as they keep adapting to what we create, we have to continuously develop new and creative ways to fight them.' The fungus is called Metarhizium. Sprayed on male mosquitoes, it works by producing neuroteoxins that kill when they are injected into a female mosquito. It is harmless to humans. 'The fungus additionally made infected mosquitoes less able to sense insecticides, and much more susceptible to them, so it's really a double blow against them,' St. Leger said. This could be great news in the fight against mosquito-borne illness. Last year, the rare but serious eastern equine encephalitis virus forced New York to declare an 'imminent threat,' a New Hampshire man died, and public parks and other areas closed in Massachusetts as the virus spread. This year, cities across the country have reported cases of West Nile virus, and authorities started spraying adulticide in Houston's Harris County. Malaria also continues to be a leading cause of preventable illness and death, resulting in 608,000 deaths across 85 countries in 2022. But, just how far should humans take the war against mosquitoes? It can be easy to overlook the role they play in our ecosystems. They are an important source of food for fish, frogs, and pollinators, including birds and bats. But, they are also pollinators themselves, and their primary food source is flower nectar — not blood. Of the more than 3,000 species on Earth, just 400 can transmit diseases to people, and most of them don't actually feed on humans at all, Yvonne-Marie Linton, research director at the Walter Reed Biosystematics Unit, told Smithsonian Magazine. Mosquitoes have been around buzzing around since dinosaurs roamed the Earth some 200 million years ago. Earth is currently in the middle of a human-fueled biodiversity crisis, including massive insect loss driven by agriculture and related pollution, in addition to climate change-driven disasters and other events. Without insects that pollinate billions of dollars in crops in North America, we'd have a lot less food and other products. Mosquitoes are one of the only species people have posited should be eliminated. Still, they are the world's deadliest animal. And, especially during the hot and wet summer months, the risk for disease is increasing. Human-caused climate change is creating more favorable conditions for mosquitoes, resulting in population expansion. That's especially true along U.S. coasts. But, even in droughts, they can be 'extra bitey.' 'It's believed that they alone, by transmitting disease, have killed half of all human beings who have ever lived,' St. Leger noted. 'Being able to eliminate mosquitoes quickly and effectively will save people all over the world.'
Washington Post
29-05-2025
- Business
- Washington Post
A gene could be key to growing rice, and feeding billions, in a hotter world
Rising global temperatures are threatening rice, a staple food that nourishes billions of people around the world. But researchers say they may have discovered a way to improve harvests and grain quality: by essentially silencing a temperature-sensitive gene found in some common rice varieties. A team of scientists in China recently announced that they had identified a gene that, when overheated, appears to have a negative impact on crops, lowering yield and producing chalky-looking, pasty-tasting grains. But when that gene is deactivated — through gene editing or through breeding that capitalizes on a naturally occurring variant that doesn't react to higher temperatures — rice plants produce more and better grains, according to a peer-reviewed paper published last month in the journal Cell.
Yahoo
24-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
How related are dire wolves and gray wolves? The answer might surprise you.
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In a controversial announcement earlier this month, scientists with the company Colossal Biosciences claimed they have brought back dire wolves from extinction using genetic engineering. Dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus) lived in North America during the last ice age and died out around 12,500 years ago, but fossils have preserved enough of these predators' DNA for researchers to partly reconstruct their genome. The announcement drew criticism from paleogeneticists and other experts, who argued that the newly created animals — three snow-white pups named Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi — are only like dire wolves in appearance and so are not true dire wolves. To "resurrect" the dire wolf, Colossal scientists made 20 tweaks to 14 genes in a modern-day gray wolf (Canis lupus) genome, modifying characteristics like body size and hair color. "Colossal has said that the gray wolf and dire wolf genomes are 99.5% identical, but that is still 12,235,000 individual differences," Nic Lawrence, a paleogeneticist and associate professor at the University of Otago in New Zealand, told Vox. 'So a gray wolf with 20 edits to 14 genes, even if these are key differences, is still very much a gray wolf.' In addition to the tiny number of DNA changes, experts pointed out that dire wolves and gray wolves aren't closely related in evolutionary terms. While the two species share many physical traits and the wolf-pack social structure, a seminal study published in 2021 in the journal Nature indicated that dire wolves aren't technically wolves. Related: Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone helped entire ecosystem thrive, 20-year study finds According to the study, dire wolves branched off from modern wolf-like canids — a group that includes gray wolves, coyotes (Canis latrans), dholes (Cuon alpinus), African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) and African jackals — roughly 5.7 million years ago. So just how closely related are dire wolves and grey wolves — and what does the best available evidence tell us about the evolutionary relationship between these species? The latest peer-reviewed research suggests that dire wolves and gray wolves are only distantly related, Mairin Balisi, a paleontologist and curator at the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology in California, told Live Science in an email. In the 2021 study, scientists found that dire wolves and gray wolves share a last common ancestor 5.7 million years ago during a period known as the late Miocene, said Balisi, who studies the evolution of mammalian carnivores but did not contribute to the 2021 study. The analysis, which was based on DNA extracted from five dire wolf fossils, "showed that dire wolves diverged from the ancestor of not just gray wolves, of not just the group comprising [gray wolves and their closest relatives], but of all wolf-like canids including African jackals," Balisi said. "This distant relationship justifies the genus name Aenocyon for dire wolves differing from the genus name Canis for most other wolf-like canids." The 2021 study revealed what was a decidedly blurry picture of canid evolution. "Previously scientists had interpreted dire and gray wolves to be sister species, or at least cousins through another extinct large wolf, Canis armbrusteri, because of strong similarity in their bones and teeth," Balisi said. C. armbrusteri lived in North America during the last ice age and was likely an ancestor of dire wolves, according to the study. Previous research also placed the split between dire wolves and gray wolves much later than the 2021 study, with dates ranging between 2 million years ago and 2.5 million years ago, Balisi said. The 2021 study clarified some aspects of canid evolution, but many questions remain unanswered. For example, it's still unclear which wolf-like canids are most closely related to dire wolves, Balisi said. It's entirely possible that dire wolves are more closely related to African jackals than gray wolves, she said, despite their physical appearance being closer to gray wolves, adding that "future analyses on more and/or higher-quality genomic data may shed more light on the fine-scale relationships among these canids." African jackals are divided into two species — the black-backed jackal (Canis mesomelas), native to eastern and southern Africa, and the side-striped jackal (Canis adustus), native to sub-Saharan and southern Africa. The 2021 study found that African jackals diverged from other wolf-like canids around 5.1 million years ago, forming their own branch on the evolutionary tree approximately 600,000 years after dire wolves formed theirs. Fossils show that dire wolves were larger than modern-day gray wolves and had more robust jaws and teeth, which enabled them to take down larger prey. Current studies of canid evolution rely on these fossils to determine the relationships between species, but the record may have erased crucial information, Balisi said. "It is possible that other traits that don't fossilize as readily also set apart dire wolves from gray wolves today," she said. There is also a question mark over whether dire wolves and gray wolves ever interbred. While it is possible that they did, the 2021 study found no evidence for gene flow between the two species, or between dire wolves and coyotes, Balisi said. "Wolf-like canids do hybridize today — e.g., gray wolves and coyotes — so interbreeding between dire and gray wolves may have happened and just has yet to be detected," Balisi said. But gray wolves and coyotes are much more closely related to each other than gray wolves and dire wolves, so it may be that the latter two have evolved bigger reproductive differences, she said. Following Colossal's announcement, the company uploaded a paper to the preprint database bioRxiv with new (but not yet peer-reviewed) findings about the dire wolf's evolutionary history. RELATED STORIES —Wolves in Ethiopia spotted licking 'red hot poker' flowers like lollipops —Dogs may have domesticated themselves because they really liked snacks, model suggests —Yellowstone's 'queen of the wolves' killed by rival pack after living to 11 years old and having 10 litters of pups The results, based on two fossils dating to 13,000 and 72,000 years ago, suggest that dire wolves descended from a lineage that was itself born from interbreeding between two lineages: a sister lineage to the one that produced modern-day South American canids (Cerdocyonina) and a sister lineage to the one that produced the African wild dog. The research may shed light on how dire wolves evolved as a species, but it does not claim to rewrite the findings of the 2021 study. Overall, the new clues "may be a valid update to the literature," so long as they hold up to peer review, Balisi said. Regardless of whether peer review deems the study robust, the currently available evidence tells us that dire wolves and gray wolves are not closely related, which means that Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi are not dire wolves.
