dengue fever

Gene-modded mosquitoes will fight Dengue Fever in Brazil

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The Brazilian city of Piracicaba has a potent new weapon in the ongoing fight against Dengue Fever, which infects more than a million people annually: genetically modified mosquito lotharios Created by Oxitec of Abingdon, UK and bred locally within Brazil, these GM mosquitoes (all of which are male) are designed to crash the local population before they can spread the tropical disease. More than six million have been released throughout Piracicaba since April. When a GM male mates with a wild female, his sapper genetics cause the resulting larvae to die before they can reach adulthood. What’s more, the larvae also carry a genetic mutation that causes them to glow red under UV light, giving researchers an easy way to identify them on sight. “It gives an instant readout of how successfully you’re driving down the native population,” Hadyn Parry, chief executive of Oxitec, told New Scientist.

 

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New Dengue-Detecting Antibodies

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Researchers uncover a class of antibodies that may confer immunity to different serotypes of the dengue virus.

 

A study of antibodies from the blood of patients infected with dengue virus has revealed a group of antibodies that recognize a unique envelope dimer epitope (EDE), which spans two protein subunits on the viral surface. Antibodies to EDE effectively neutralized all four dengue serotypes in cell culture experiments, an international team led by researchers at Imperial College London reported today (December 15) in Nature Immunology. The finding could guide strategies to develop a broadly protective vaccine against dengue, a mosquito-borne virus that infects about 400 million people per year.

Although only about 25 percent of people infected with dengue develop symptoms, the disease can lead to severe, and potentially lethal, hemorrhagic fever. Dengue is a growing problem in both developing and developed countries. Designing vaccines has been a long-standing challenge because of the unstable structure of the virus and the differences among its four serotypes.

“The shell of the virus is made up of a rather beautiful array of these envelope proteins all stacked together,” study coauthor Gavin Screaton of Imperial College London said during a press briefing.  “The antibody actually recognizes the junction between two of these proteins, so it will only recognize the protein when it’s made on the virus.”

 

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