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Here’s a cunning way to create a mosquito population that’s free of the malaria parasite: genetically engineer mosquitoes that kill it off.

at the University of Arizona at Tucson and colleagues put a novel gene into the mosquito species that carries malaria in India. The new gene permanently switched on a set of genes normally affected by insulin and involved in the immune system. The result was an increased immune response. No mosquitoes with two copies of this novel gene became infected after consuming malarial blood. This “was definitely a pleasant surprise”, says Riehle.

Better still, just one copy of the gene reduced the insects’ lifespan by 20 per cent. This could help stop mosquitoes transmitting malaria, since the parasite requires nearly the entire normal lifespan of a mosquito to mature and become infectious.

Before such anti-malaria mosquitoes could be effective in the wild, though, they would probably need an additional genetic tweak, says Riehle, to give them a competitive advantage over wild mosquitoes. Otherwise enough wild insects will persist to keep spreading malaria.

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