Scientists create new strain of malaria-blocking mosquito

Wow, this article fails to link, and the Nature editorial[1] has a failed link. Here is the paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/11/18/1521077112.abst...

[1] http://www.nature.com/news/gene-drive-mosquitoes-engineered-...

>"A total of 680 G0 wild-type embryos of the Indian strain of An. stephensi (15) was injected with a solution... A total of 122 and 129 adult males and females, respectively (37%), survived to the adult stage. Adults were assigned to 22 male-founder and 9 female-founder pools and outcrossed to wild-type adults of the opposite sex. Two males positive for DsRed fluorescence (DsRed+), designated 10.1 and 10.2, were recovered following screening of 25,712 G1 larvae. [...] G0 males and females were outcrossed to wild-type mosquitoes in pools of ∼5 G0 males or 15–30 G0 females. All G1, G2, G3, and G4 progeny were screened as larvae for DsRed fluorescence"

So they started with 680 embryos they attempted to modify. Out of these, 251/680 survived (what is normal survival to adulthood?). They do not report whether these had red eyes, what the sequences were, etc. But then they mated these with normal mosquitoes (0% red eyes in the WT? They don't say) and saw that 2/25712 (~1 in 10,000) of the offspring had red eyes. They also show blots containing a single technical replicate from each of the two red-eyed mosquitoes that indicate both normal and edited genes were present.

Everything else is based on further analysis of progeny from these two mosquitoes (which were one generation removed from the gene modification step). There is very little info here regarding what happened during the initial steps. Also, I see no mention of blinding. I wonder if this can be explained some other way.

So a super mosquito... humm.

Url changed from http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/24/health/malaria-mosquito-strain..., which points to this.