Everybody hates mosquitos. That’s a pretty fair assumption to make. Unless you’re one of the people who value the life of the mosquito because it supports the life of other animals in the food chain (namely spiders, which are also widely hated), it’s most likely that upon seeing one of these things, you’re instantly engulfed in a pesticidal fury.
Well, for these people at least, there’s good news. We seem to have discovered a better way to combat that tiny, high-pitched whirring noise in your left ear right before you fall asleep. So throw out the bug spray, the fly swatter, the hazmat suit and the legally questionable flamethrower you have in the basement, and get ready to use mosquitoes against themselves.
Mosquitoes aren’t just annoying; they’re actually quite dangerous. Malaria, the Zika virus, yellow fever: one bite is all it takes. Researchers have been aware of this for quite some time, and the quest for a solution has been a long and harrowing one.
The attempts to research a species of mosquito known as “Aedes aegypti” were constantly halted by the lack of understanding of the species’ genome, making it extraordinarily difficult to develop a defense against their disease-spreading abilities.
CDC
Aedes aegypti, also known as the “yellow fever mosquito” (also identified by their white-striped appearance), is a common type of mosquito that’s despised by many. The researchers at Rockefeller University despised it for a different reason than most others, however: its genome was remarkably difficult to nail down in its entirety.
They were only able to get bits and pieces at a time, and without knowing where these pieces went or how they fit together, they weren’t able to use them very effectively at all. To understand the frustration of this, imagine buying a jigsaw puzzle of a splatter painting that has an undefined amount of pieces. On the box, it says: “Better find a way to put this together soon, or diseases are going to keep spreading. Good luck!”
Eventually, the researchers at Rockefeller University were so fed up with trying to find the elusive genes of this micro-beast. They reached out on Twitter and discovered that there were other researchers who were experiencing the same frustrations. Together, they formed an organization called the “Aedes Genome Working Group.”
Their group formed a unique assembly line for sequencing the genome of the mosquito. The Rockefeller researchers sent their snippets of DNA to a company called Pacific Biosciences. This company then translated these snippets into much longer chains of genetic information, before finally sending them to “Bionano Genomics,” who then interpreted how these longer chains came together. Lastly, these results were sent to Baylor University to be put together in the context of entire chromosomes.
Paul I. Howell, MPH; Prof. Frank Hadley Collins/CDC
Going back to the impossible jigsaw puzzle, think of the Rockefeller researchers sending individual pieces of the puzzle to Pacific Biosciences. PB then puts these pieces together into larger clusters of pieces that fit together, and send these off to Bionano Genomics. BG inspects the larger clusters and proceeds to fit them together; and lastly, Baylor University serves as the final destination where the puzzle is assembled.
From the pestilent pacifists to the pesticide advocates, this new “blueprint” of the inner workings of the mosquito gives way to all sorts of new and inventive ways to enforce a restraining order between you and whatever mosquito thinks you’re looking like a snack. From disabling their sense of smell to annihilating the majority of their female people-biting population at any given time, ideas are flying left and right in the winds of the mosquito-fighting brainstorm.
Jumanji (1995)
Something concerning was also revealed when analyzing the genome, however. It seems that the mosquitoes may be evolving to withstand the pesticides we’ve been pelting them with for so long. While it’s terrifying to think of evolved super-mosquitos the size of baseballs in a few hundred years, reading their genes may be our only way to make sure our bug-killing chemicals are evolving alongside them.