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Brazil declares emergency after 2,400 babies are born with brain damage

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Re: Brazil declares emergency after 2,400 babies are born with brain damage

#141
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world needs more bats. While bats will eat other more nutritious insects like moths, wasps, etc. before mosquitos, they can help control the mosquito population in areas where there are many mosquitos, and most of the insects they get rid of are a nuisance to humans: http://www.mosquito.org/faq#bats

I wasn't aware of that. Where I live, in a mountainous area of Thailand, we have lots of bats, small insect eaters to large fruit eaters. It's quite a show around sundown watching them swoop overhead. We also have lots of mosquitoes and the population sure isn't dwindling. We've got the aedes aegypti and there have been a few cases of dengue in my area. I don't think bats are going to solve the problem.

https://www.batcon.org/pdfs/bathouses/MosquitoControl.pdf

"Individuals of some bat species can capture from 500 to 1,000 mosquitoes in a single hour and large colonies can consume tremendous quantities. For example, a Florida colony of 30,000 southeastern bats consumes 50 tons of insects annually, including over 15 tons of mosquitoes and from 77.4% to 84.6% of little brown bats living in the northern U.S. and Canada eat mosquitoes."

Bats don't get rid of mosquitoes completely, but the right species of bat can be great to have to help keep their numbers down.

Re: Brazil declares emergency after 2,400 babies are born with brain damage

#142
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The paper is linked at the top of this whole thread. The technology could be used to prevent transmission or drive the mosquitos to extinction. Preventing transmission is harder because there are so many diseases to prevent. How do you think it might veer wildly off plan?

Can you explain what the advantage of the gene drive system is here? Looking at the paper, I see "Cassette exchange progeny" was only successful 0.05-0.38% of the time (table 1). So they need ~10,000 flies to get 10 mutants. Then in Supp Figure 3 I see detection of the "modified" DNA in the WT flies, and Figure 1c shows a good proportion of WT flies (denoted as "+/+" in that figure) were infertile as well! So it seem…

Sorry for the long delay. I think the problem is you need to understand what a gene drive is to understand the significance of this work. Have a look at the second paper I linked to and also George Church's I link lower down.
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