Compounds produced by bacteria of the island of Crete kill the larvae of mosquitoes vectors of diseases and could be used in biological insecticides.
Bacteria isolated in the ecosystems of the island of Crete could be our allies against mosquitoes vectors of diseases. Extracts produced with the metabolic substances of three bacteria collected in this angle of the Mediterranean have eliminated in 24 hours the totality of the larvae of Culex Pipiens harassmentthe London Metro mosquitoassociated with the transmission of viral diseases. This was revealed by a research by the American company of microbiology published in the scientific journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
Harassing and resistant mosquitoes
The diseases transmitted by mosquitoes kill more than 700,000 people every year, and these buzzing carriers they are developing resistance to the most common synthetic insecticides. Bioinsecticides, derived from substances of microbiological or botany origin, place less risks to health and the environment, but their availability is still limited.
The London Metro mosquito (Culex Pipiens harassment) It is a common mosquito subspecies adapted to the urban environment, so called because the Londoner refugees in the underground underground during the bombings of the Second World War punished. Can transmit the pathogens Responsibles of the Nile fever (West Nile Fever) and the fever of the Rift Valleytwo zoonosis that may have serious complications – vision disorders in both cases, encephalitis and coma, the first, hemorrhages and liver involvement, the second.
Land, trees and Cretan waters
During the microbiopest project, financed by the European Union for the search for bacteria with mosquito properties in the Mediterranean region, George Dimopoulos, entomologist and microbiologist of the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore and the Molecular Biology Institute and Biotechnology of Crete, collected 186 champions where to find bacteria from 65 different locations on the Greek island. He searched in the surface soil and around the roots, in plant fabrics, water and dead animals, up to obtaining Some promising substances of bacterial origin who put in contact with mosquito larvae.
More than a hundred compounds have killed all the larvae of mosquitoes within a week; 37, which included 20 genres of bacteria, many of which never identified so far as potential insecticides, have exterminated the mosquitoes in just three days. Three of these have Eliminated 100% of the larvae in 24 hours.
There is no real infection
A fact deemed promising for the production of future bioinsecticides, is that these compounds, obtained from metabolic substances of different bacteria, they did not kill the larvae through an infection; Proteins and other metabolites eliminated the mosquitoes. Any insecticides based on these products could therefore work even without the need to contain live and active bacteria inside them.
A discovery that the authors of the study consider promising not only for the control of dangerous mosquitoes, but also for that of agricultural weeds.
Now it will enter a second phase of the research, in which it will try to know better structure and method of action of the molecules, so as to approach an application stage.
