UMR_D 190 "Emergence des Pathologies Virales", Aix-Marseille Université, IRD (French Institute of Research for Development), EHESP (French School of Public Health), 27, Bd Jean Moulin, 13385 Marseille Cedex 5, France.
Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Austin Peay State University, 601 College Street, Clarksville, 37044 TN, USA.
J Theor Biol. 2014 Apr 21;347:33-43. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2014.01.010. Epub 2014 Jan 15.
Transgenic mosquitoes are a potential tool for the control or eradication of insect-vectored diseases. For malaria, one possible strategy relies on the introduction of malaria-refractory transgenes into wild Anopheles mosquito populations that would limit their capacity to transmit the disease. The success of such an approach obviously depends on a variety of factors. By developing a model that integrates both population genetics and epidemiology, we explore how mosquito mating preferences and the cost and efficacy of refractoriness affects the long-term prevalence of malaria in humans subsequent to a single generation inundative release of male transgenic mosquitoes. As may be intuitively expected, mating discrimination by wild-type individuals against transgenic ones generally reduces the probability that transgenes become stably established at a high frequency in mosquito populations. We also show that in circumstances where transgenic individuals exhibit some degree of discrimination against wild-type individuals, this can favour the spread of refractory alleles and lead to a significant reduction in malaria prevalence in the human population (if the efficacy of a dominant refractory mechanism exceeds at least 75%). The existence of such a non-intuitive outcome highlights the practical value of increasing the understanding of Anopheles mating preferences in the wild as a means to harness them in the implementation of population replacement approaches. Potential strategies by which previously described mating preferences of Anopheles gambiae populations could be exploited to manipulate the mate choice of transgenic release stocks are discussed.
转基因蚊子是控制或消灭昆虫传播疾病的一种潜在工具。对于疟疾，一种可能的策略是将疟疾抗性转基因引入野生疟蚊种群中，从而限制其传播疾病的能力。这种方法的成功显然取决于多种因素。通过开发一种整合种群遗传学和流行病学的模型，我们探讨了蚊子交配偏好以及抗性的成本和效果如何影响在单次大量释放雄性转基因蚊子后人类疟疾的长期流行率。正如直观预期的那样，野生型个体对转基因个体的交配歧视通常会降低转基因在蚊子种群中以高频率稳定建立的概率。我们还表明，在转基因个体对野生型个体表现出一定程度歧视的情况下，这可能有利于抗性等位基因的传播，并导致人群中疟疾流行率显著降低（如果显性抗性机制的效果至少超过 75%）。这种非直观结果的存在突出了增加对野生疟蚊交配偏好的理解的实际价值，这是利用它们实施种群替代方法的一种手段。讨论了如何利用之前描述的冈比亚按蚊种群的交配偏好来操纵转基因释放品系的交配选择的潜在策略。
