Acetic acid bacteria, Plasmodium and Anopheles: a possible future menage a trois?

Malaria is a global health problem that threatens 300 to 500 million people and kills around 3 million per year (mostly children). The control strategies currently available, mostly represented by the use of drugs and insecticides, are becoming less effective due to resistance developed by parasites and vectors, thus, new effective control methods are urgently required. In the last years much interest has been devoted to the development of methods which can prevent the parasite from development in the mosquito vector. Even though engineered mosquito which express anti-Plasmodium effector molecules have been set up, still several problems have to be overcame. In particular an efficient delivery system which can drive the effector molecule(s) in the mosquito populations is strongly required. In this context, a paratransgenic approach, a bacteria-based system to produce effector molecules to interfere with parasite development, would probably overcome most of the actual limitations associated with the release of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes (Riehle & Lorena, 2005). Indeed, paratransgenesis can be compatible with insect treatment, the chosen bacterium would be able to colonize a wide spectrum of mosquito species and the “production” of recombinant bacteria is much simpler and safer than rearing consistent number of GM mosquitoes. The identification of a suitable bacteria to be effectively employed in the paratrangenetic control of malaria vector is therefore strongly needed.