With the Zika virus spreading largely unchecked in Latin America and the Caribbean by way of a now-notorious insect, some of the nation’s leading mosquito researchers are striving to assemble a state-of-the-art DNA map that they say will help them fight the disease with the mosquito’s own genetic code.
[...] others favor the idea of selectively breeding populations of mosquitoes, like corn or cattle, for desirable — or, at least, less undesirable — traits, such as a preference for biting animals other than humans.
The bid to map the genome of the Aedes mosquito has received little attention, perhaps because a map in itself will not yield a fix for Zika, any more than the human genome map has yielded a cure for cancer.
