Scientists have developed an intelligent form of combat bug to bug the fight against Chagas disease, a potentially fatal infection transmitted by muscle aphidlike kissing bug. The new weapon is a bacterium normally found in the gut of the insect, which is designed to produce a lethal protein. The modified bacteria described in tomorrow Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , could help prevent Chagas disease, "a scourge that kills about 45,000 people a year in South and Central America. It could also provide a model approach compared to other diseases transmitted by insects.
A team of Yale University, Rockefeller University in New York, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has developed a strain of the bacteria Rhodococcus rhodnii who lives in the gut of the insect kiss to produce an insect antibiotic called cecropin A. researchers exploited a food unappetizing habit of kissing bugs - they eat the feces on the other - by peppering fake feces with the modified bacteria. Bugs lapped it up. Once inside, the bacterial Trojan began pumping cécropine A bug in the bowels of the kiss, which are also home to Trypanosoma cruzi , the culprit behind Chagas disease. A cecropin kills trypanosomes, but leaves unharmed insects.
"It is fantastic," said Thomas Miller, an entomologist at the University of California, Riverside. "It changes the way we think about things." Besides kissing bugs, he says, this technique could be used to hijack a variety of other disease-carrying insects, mosquitoes that transmit malaria deer ticks that transmit . Lyme disease a member of the Yale team Frank Richards confirms: "It is a general principle that can be used in many systems."
One potential problem is that T. cruzi could quickly develop resistance to cecropin A: "If you try to treat anything with monotherapy, resistance develops quickly enough" , said a member of the Yale Ravi Duravasula team. He and his colleagues are probing ways to overcome potential resistance as obtaining the R. rhodnii to churn to a second antibiotic . Meanwhile, researchers are modified bacterium to the test in a controlled field trial in huts sealed in Guatemala.
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