(Jason Rasgon, Professor of Entomology, Pennsylvania
State University) To do genetic engineering
in arthropods, normally you use a microscope
and a computer controlled manipulator to inject
very small quantities of material into the
eggs of arthropods.
And so what we’ve done instead is we’ve
developed a technology where we can take these
materials and inject them directly into the
body of the female mosquito or other insect
and actually engineer, we can target the gene-editing
material directly to the ovaries and engineer
the offspring essentially inside the female
so that when she lays eggs she’s laying
eggs that are already genetically modified.
The Equipment to inject eggs can cost anywhere
from 20 to 50 thousand dollars and it can
take weeks to learn how to use it.
The equipment we use to inject the mosquitoes
costs about a dollar.
It’s basically a tube with a little glass
needle on the end of it and you can train
somebody to do that in about five minutes.
Once we know that it is working with the eye
color genes you can then target, in theory,
any gene in the genome.
Anything you want so, a gene that would make
the mosquito unable to transmit Zika virus
for instance or a gene that would sterilize
the mosquito.
We really want to take this technology and
move it to any insect or arthropod of interest.
Penn State has been a great place to do this,
I’m in the department of entomology and
I’ve got multiple collaborators on this
grant that work on different insect systems
and having this broad expertise available
at Penn State is really why we were able to
pull this grant together and make it as powerful
as we think it’s going to be.
