Only females feast on human blood, transmitting not only yellow fever but also dengue and several other diseases. But what if you could turn all mosquitoes into males? That’s a possibility raised by new research that pinpoints the gene that determines whether a mosquito becomes male. To find the gene, scientists sequenced thousands of pieces of DNA from male and female mosquitoes belonging to two different strains of A. aegypti and look ed for stretches that were more common in males of both strains. They found 164 such sequences and matched them against data showing what genes are active in embryos, looking for sequences that seemed to be active in early male embryos. In the 24 sequences that remained, they found one new gene, which they named Nix. The scientists injected Nix into mosquito embryos and found more than two-thirds of the female mosquitoes developed male genitals and testes. When they removed Nix using a genome-editing method known as CRISPR-Cas9, male mosquitoes...
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