From foe to friend: Mosquitoes that transmit malaria may help fight the disease

For many years, the mosquitoes that transmit malaria to humans were seen as public enemies, and campaigns to eradicate the disease focused on eliminating the mosquitoes. But, as a study published today in Science shows, the mosquitoes can also be our allies in the fight against this common foe, which kills almost one million people a year and heavily impairs the economies of affected countries. In this study, researchers at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory (EMBL) in Heidelberg, Germany, and the Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale (INSERM) in Strasbourg, France, discovered that variations in a single gene affect mosquitoes' ability to resist infection by the malaria parasite...

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