*Rare DNA sequences illuminate early humans’ history in Africa
SCIENTISTS are getting closer in efforts to eliminate malaria with new genetic engineering tool. Scientists have devised a gene drive that wiped out the mosquito’s populations in lab tests.
They say gene editing may push a species of malaria-carrying mosquito to extinction.
These new results come from a small-scale laboratory study. Researchers used a genetic engineering tool to make changes to species called (Ah-nof-eh-lees Gam-bee-aye). As a result, the mosquitoes stopped producing offspring in eight to 12 generations. The researchers reported this September 24 in
If the finding holds up in larger studies, this tool could be the first capable of wiping out a disease-carrying mosquito species.
The researchers changed the mosquitoes’ genes with a gene drive. Gene drives use the molecular “scissors” known as CRISPR/CAS9 to copy and paste themselves into an organism’s Deoxy ribonucleic Acid (Dna)/genetic material at precise locations. They’re designed to break the rules of inheritance. They can quickly spread a genetic tweak to all offspring. The new gene drive breaks a mosquito gene called doublesex. Female mosquitoes that inherit two copies of the broken gene develop like males. They are unable to bite or lay eggs. Being unable to bite means they can’t spread the malaria parasite. Males and females that inherit only one copy of the disrupted gene develop normally and are fertile. Males don’t bite, whether they have the gene drive or not.
Other gene-drive studies have done computer simulations to predict how long it would take for the drives to spread through a population. This is the first time the approach has succeeded in actual mosquitoes.
Meanwhile, studied ethnic groups on the continent are helping researchers to understand the movements of people who lived there tens of thousands of years ago.
Humankind’s early history in Africa is coming into sharper focus with a new study of 180 genomes from a dozen ethnic groups on the continent — some of which have never before been analysed. These preliminary results suggest that more than 40,000 years ago, two of the groups — the San and the Baka Pygmy — were roughly twice the size of other ethnic groups present at the time, and that the San and Baka overlapped in centraleastern or southern Africa. Researchers presented these as-yet unpublished results at an American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG) meeting in San Diego, California, United States (U.S.), last week.
This is the most comprehensive wholegenome sequencing from groups that represent the ancestral diversity of humans, says Sarah Tishkoff, a human geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who coled the project. Together with genetic analyses of ancient human remains from Africa published last year, the latest data are starting to fill in the nearly blank canvas of early human history. Although Homo sapiens originated in Africa roughly 250,000 to 315,000 years ago, geneticists have devoted their attention almost exclusively to the small subset of Africans that migrated north to Europe tens of thousands of years later. A handful of African genomics projects are now beginning to address this imbalance.
In 2009, Tishkoff and her colleagues published a study3 assessing small sections of the genome from people belonging to about 100 of the more than 2,000 ethnic groups in Africa today. The results suggested that the San and the Baka might have descended from a single lineage of hunter-gatherers. But Tishkoff needed whole genomes from them and other ethnic groups to test this idea.
Her team spent years getting approvals for the project from government and institutional ethical review boards in countries in eastern, southern and western Africa. Tishkoff and her colleagues partnered with local researchers and spoke about genetics with the communities that they hoped to enrol in the project, explaining what the scientists and the groups could learn about their early ancestry. Many of the communities live in remote regions — such as the Sabue people of southwestern Ethiopia — and geneticists know little about them. Genomics research in Africa can be contentious, and many scientists engage in such outreach to involve the communities they work with in the research. The Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3africa) Initiative — an African-led consortium that supports genomics research — has called for a more substantive role for Africa-based scientists in such projects. And last year, an Indigenous group in South Africa introduced research-ethics guidelines for scientists looking to work with them.
A Nigerian genetic epidemiologist at the National Human Genome Research Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, US, Charles Rotimi, who founded the initiative said H3africa has sequenced more than 400 genomes from African individuals.