A new designer fruit fly paves the way for scientists to replace disease-carrying mosquitoes with harmless, genetically modified versions, says Dr Maciej Maselko from Applied BioSciences.
Normally, the news of a new species of fruit fly would be interesting only for entomologists. But a new species recently described in Nature Communications is far out of the ordinary.
Dr Maciej Maselko, a CSIRO Synthetic Biology Future Science Fellow, is part of a team that has engineered a new species of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster in about a year, far outpacing the slow course of natural evolution.
In doing so, they have developed the foundational technology that will prevent genetically modified organisms (GMOs) from ‘getting away’ and reproducing with wild species.
This new method instead uses engineered pests to reduce the wild population or replace it with a less harmful version.
The technology also opens the door to new approaches to precisely targeted biological control measures for invasive species and disease-carrying insects.
As Australians are all too well aware, in the past, biological control strategies for pest insects have not been unqualified successes. But those strategies involved introducing a whole new – and extremely fertile – class of creatures (such as cane toads) into an ecosystem.
"This new method instead uses engineered pests to reduce the wild population or replace it with a less harmful version," Maselko says.