Abstract
BackgroundMore effective mosquito control strategies are urgently required due to the increasing prevalence of insecticide resistance. The sterile insect technique (SIT) and the release of insects carrying a dominant lethal allele (RIDL) are two proposed methods for environmentally-friendly, species-targeted population control. These methods may be more suitable for developing countries if producers reduce the cost of rearing insects. The cost of control programs could be reduced by producing all-male mosquito populations to circumvent the isolation of females before release without reducing male mating competitiveness caused by transgenes.ResultsAn RNAi construct targeting the RNA recognition motif of the Aedes aegypti transformer-2 (tra-2) gene does not trigger female-to-male sex conversion as commonly observed among dipterous insects. Instead, homozygous insects show greater mortality among m-chromosome-bearing sperm and mm zygotes, yielding up to 100 % males in the subsequent generations. The performance of transgenic males was not significantly different to wild-type males in narrow-cage competitive mating experiments.ConclusionOur data provide preliminary evidence that the knockdown of Ae. aegypti tra-2 gene expression causes segregation distortion acting at the level of gametic function, which is reinforced by sex-specific zygotic lethality. This finding could promote the development of new synthetic sex distorter systems for the production of genetic sexing mosquito strains.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s13071-016-1331-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
More effective mosquito control strategies are urgently required due to the increasing prevalence of insecticide resistance
Investigation of the genetic mechanism of sexdetermination Transgenic line 6 was analyzed in genetic crossing experiments, which are summarized in Additional file 2: Table S3
We have investigated the function of the tra-2 gene in an Ae.aegypti tra-2 RNA interference (RNAi) transgenic line
Summary
More effective mosquito control strategies are urgently required due to the increasing prevalence of insecticide resistance. The sterile insect technique (SIT) and the release of insects carrying a dominant lethal allele (RIDL) are two proposed methods for environmentally-friendly, species-targeted population control. These methods may be more suitable for developing countries if producers reduce the cost of rearing insects. Two novel methods based on the suppression of reproduction have been applied in mosquitoes, namely the sterile insect technique (SIT) and the release of insects carrying a dominant lethal allele (RIDL) [1,2,3,4,5] These methods produce offspring of both sexes and 0.5–1 % of mosquitoes are physically misidentified as males during the sexing step in these techniques. The excess of MD males involves isochromatid breakage in the m-chromosome before or
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