Reducing the population of the Asian tiger mosquito in Valencia by inoculating males with the Wolbachia bacteria investigated. A team of researchers from the University of Valencia (UV) is working on two projects funded, one by the Valencia City Council and the other by the Ministry of Science and Innovation, to reduce the population of the Asian tiger mosquito in the city. Rosario Gil García, a professor at the institution in the Department of Genetics, directs the molecular research in both, which is being developed now, and whose objective is to introduce the Wolbachia bacteria into the eggs of mosquitoes and create a population that, when mating, gives rise to sterile embryos. The rains of last week and temperatures above 22 degrees have caused the mosquito eggs, deposited in the ground, to hatch and, after four or five days, the number of these insects has increased. The Asian tiger mosquito ( Aedes albopictus ) can transmit diseases such as Zika or dengue - although less likely than the African one, Aedes aegypti - and with the trend towards an increasingly warmer environment, it is a vector of potential diseases to control. Rosario Gil, researcher at the Institute of Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio), a joint centre of the UV and the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), explains that one of the biocontrol systems that is being developed against the tiger mosquito is the use of the Wolbachia bacteria, sometimes used to prevent viruses from being transmitted and other times to prevent mosquitoes from reproducing.
