SuperSIT - Sustainable Sterile Insect Technique

New, clean, safe, and more effective methods for controlling mosquito-borne viruses are urgently required. One attractive approach is to release sterile male mosquitoes to mate wild females, thereby reducing their reproductive potential - the Sterile Insect Technique (SIT). However, SIT requires frequent releases of very large numbers of such males. A radical new SIT variant is proposed, which is sustainable and persistent - SuperSIT. If successfully developed and deployed, this will provide the established (by the PI and others) benefits of effective, environmentally-friendly, species-specific control, while dramatically (20-100x) reducing the number of sterile males needed, thereby reducing cost of delivery. Much improved environmental persistence will also reduce the vulnerability of the SIT to interruptions; together with reduced resource requirements and the possibility of low-cost, local deployment even in resource-constrained settings, this makes the method much more sustainable than current alternatives.

The new approach will be developed in Ae. aegypti, the main vector of (e.g.) dengue, chikungunya and Zika, exploiting specific biological features of culicine mosquitoes that facilitate development, and the PI's long experience of applied insect synthetic biology. The project comprises five Objectives, of which three are independent, parallel synbio paths to providing the novel genetic traits of the SuperSIT concept. This parallel approach mitigates development risk in this ambitious, high-risk/high-return project. Another Objective aims to provide a complementary strain to facilitate mass-production, while the final one incorporates the sophisticated, iterative testing of the novel strains. Substantial preliminary data support each necessary step in the programme. The aim of this project is to develop initial prototype strains and assess their performance in laboratory cage experiments; no field releases are envisioned within the scope of this project.