ABINGDON / UK — A British company Oxitec may have a way to fight Zika virus. They create genetically modified mosquitoes that produce offspring that will not survive into adulthood.

The company uses a tetracycline repressible activator variant or tTAV which ties up the transcriptional machinery of cells, causing them to die before adulthood.

Created in a lab, Oxitec mosquitoes are given a tetracycline antidote which allows for normal cell expression. These lab mosquitoes will survive into adulthood, whereupon the males will be released into the wild.

The offspring of the lab mosquitoes will not possess the antidote and will therefore die before reaching adulthood, reducing the mosquito population and the spread of Zika virus.

The modified mosquitoes are non-toxic to predators that eat them. They also contain hereditary fluorescent markers to help researchers distinguish them from wild mosquitoes.

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