Can we make mosquitoes resist malaria?

Gene drives were in the news again recently, and readers of this blog will know that I’m strongly in favor of using them to end malaria, which kills over 600,000 people per year. Previously, I’ve written about gene drives which cause female-specific sterility in mosquitoes, leading to collapse of mosquito populations.Now, researchers from Ethan Bier’s lab have demonstrated a different approach. Instead of a gene drive causing sterility, they engineered a drive which makes mosquitos resistant to ...