
In Memoriam: Bart Baker
Baker, former senior vice president of J.T. Eaton & Co., died on Jan. 3. He was 78.
Baker, former senior vice president of J.T. Eaton & Co., died on Jan. 3. He was 78.
The association announced that this year's Legislative Day has been moved to a virtual event due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual event will take place March 16-17.
FAIRFAX, Va. — NPMA announced that this year's Legislative Day has been moved to a virtual event due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. The virtual event will take place March 16-17.
NPMA noted in its Jan. 5 ePestWorld enewsletter, "With a new Congress, we need your voices and can’t take a break because of a pandemic. We need you to talk to your Senators and Congressmen and tell them why we are an essential service and with all of the new Congress people we need to tell them WHY and HOW we are protectors of public health, food and property. And we have a path forward for you to do just that."
Mark your calendar for March 16-17.
CLICK HERE to register.
CLICK HERE to read a draft of the program.
To help residents prepare for 2021, entomologists from Rentokil and its family of pest control providers used field knowledge and data to provide their predictions for pests in the upcoming year.
Mosquitoes on the move
Mosquitoes populations have been increasing over the last few years. Aedes species, which are disease-carrying mosquitoes, are also moving to new areas. These mosquitoes can carry West Nile Virus, Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) and Zika virus, among other diseases.
The Arc Jacksonville serves and advocates for individuals with intellectual and developmental differences to achieve their full potential and to participate in community life.
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. - The Arc Jacksonville announces new board leadership for 2021, led by new Chairman, John Cooksey.
Cooksey is the Chief Operations Officer and Entomologist of McCall Service. He has served on The Arc Jacksonville’s Board since 2015. He is the board advisor of The Jacksonville School for Autism, past president of the Rotary Club of Orange Park, past chairman of the board of Grace Episcopal Day School, past president of the Mandarin Museum and Historical Society and past chairman of the Black Creek District of the Boy Scouts of America. John has served many different roles in the Florida Pest Management Association including President in 2013 and is the current treasurer of the Florida Pest Management Foundation. John and his wife Leyda live in Jacksonville and have three children ages 19, 21 and 23.
A new Texas A&M AgriLife Research project aims to enable temporary “test runs” of proposed genetic changes in mosquitoes, after which the changes remove themselves from the mosquitoes’ genetic code.
To control mosquito populations and prevent them from transmitting diseases such as malaria, many researchers are pursuing strategies in mosquito genetic engineering. A new Texas A&M AgriLife Research project aims to enable temporary “test runs” of proposed genetic changes in mosquitoes, after which the changes remove themselves from the mosquitoes’ genetic code.
The project’s first results were published on Dec. 28 in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, titled “Making gene drive biodegradable.”
“People are wary of transgenes spreading in the environment in an uncontrolled manner. We feel that ours is a strategy to potentially prevent that from happening,” Adelman said. “The idea is, can we program a transgene to remove itself? Then, the gene won’t persist in the environment.
“What it really comes down to is, how do you test a gene drive in a real-world scenario?” he added. “What if a problem emerges? We think ours is one possible way to be able to do risk assessment and field testing.”
Many genetic engineering proposals revolve around inserting into mosquitoes a select set of new genes along with a “gene drive.” A gene drive is a genetic component that forces the new genes to spread in the population.
“A number of high-profile publications have talked about using a gene drive to control mosquitoes, either to change them so they can’t transmit malaria parasites anymore, or to kill off all the females so the population dies out,” Adelman said.
An often-voiced worry is that such genetic changes could carry unintended or harmful consequences.
In the project’s first publication, the colleagues describe three ways for an introduced genetic change to remove itself after a designated period of time. The time period could, for instance, be 20 generations of mosquitoes, or about a year. The team modeled how the genes would spread among mosquitoes based on generation times and parameters of an average mosquito’s life. Of the three methods, the team has chosen one to pursue further.
This method takes advantage of a process all animals use to repair damaged DNA, Adelman said. Inside cell nuclei, repair enzymes search for repeated genetic sequences around broken DNA strands. The repair enzymes then delete what’s between the repeats, he said.
So, Adelman and Myles’ team plans to test in fruit flies and mosquitoes a gene drive, a DNA-cutting enzyme and a small repeat of the insect’s own DNA.
Once the introduced enzyme cuts the DNA, the insect’s own repair tools should jump into action. The repair tools will cut out the genes for the gene drive and the other added sequences. At least, that’s what should happen in theory.
The team has already started lab work to test different gene drives and determine how long they last in flies and mosquitoes. The goal is to see a gene drive spread rapidly through a lab insect population. After a few generations, the added genes should disappear and the population should again consist of wild-type individuals.
“We assigned various rates of failure for how often the mechanism does not work as expected,” Adelman said. “The models predict that even with a very high rate of failure, if it succeeds just 5% of the time, that’s still enough to get rid of the transgene.”