Alphabet Inc’s Verily Life Sciences unit,formerly known as Google Life Sciences,has begun releasing infertile bacteria-infected male mosquitoes in California’s Fresno.
According to Verily, the campaign started on July 14 marking the launch of Debug Fresno, a field study that aims to clear yellow fever mosquitoes from the central California, reports the MIT Technology Review.
The yellow fever mosquitoes, also known as Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, which first arrived in the area in 2013 and are known to spread the chikungunya, Zika virus and dengue, although none of these viruses are currently spreading in Fresno.
Verily said it has built a robot that can raise infertile male insects and Verily is working with Fresno’s Consolidated Mosquito Abatement District to release 1 million male mosquitoes every week for 20 weeks the first batches will contain a total of 20 million sterilized mosquitoes.
This field trial is expected to be the largest US release to date of male mosquitoes treated with Wolbachia, a type of naturally occurring bacteria that infects many types of insects in the wild. The mosquitoes being released are not genetically modified.
If the released infected male mosquitoes continue to mate with the uninfectedfemale mosquitoes, the mosquitopopulation should drop because females’ eggs aren’t able to develop properly and don’t hatch.
The idea is that the sterile males will help reduce the local mosquito population. Male mosquitoes do not bite humans and cannot transmit disease to people, so Verily and its partners aim to release only males.
Verily says it is using custom-built software algorithms and machines to ramp up the number of mosquitoes it’s able to grow and release. The mosquitoes are part of the company’s plan, announced last October, to fight diseases like Zika and dengue fever.
MosquitoMate worked with CMAD to release about 800,000 Wolbachia-infected males in 2016 in Fresno and the pilot experiment was determined to be risk-free by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Therefore, the EPA expanded the experiment, renewing in September 2016.
Friday, June 05, 2026
