Ginger Kathrens of Colorado Springs, a maker of documentary films who has chronicled the lives of a wild-horse herd in Montana, said that blocking reproduction could alter the animals' behavior.
Indeed, antibiotics that target Wolbachia have been shown to have deleterious effects on filarial nematodes, blocking reproduction, inducing developmental arrest, and killing adult nematodes (e.g., refs. 7 – 9).
Based on histological and reactive oxygen species (ROS) profiles, Rk confers a delayed but strong resistance mechanism without a hypersensitive reaction-mediated cell death process, which allows nematode development but blocks reproduction.
A parasitic castrator infection typically completely and permanently blocks host reproduction, replacing host reproductive tissues with parasite tissues [ 15- 19].
"Some drugs were known to block the reproduction of the parasite," says Mackenzie.
The group has already studied the accumulation of nasty gases such as ethylene, which block plant reproduction.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Often they disappear spontaneously, but they can be treated with corticosteroids (steroid hormones such as cortisone, prednisone, or prednisolone), with interferon (potent proteins released by cells of the immune system that block cell reproduction and modulate immune response), or, rarely, by surgical removal.
Those proteins without close orthologs in humans may be potential targets for drugs that could block parasite reproduction.
In the future further functional analysis through mutagenesis or mis-expression of those microRNAs specifically enriched during the process of male or female gametogenesis should reveal candidate genes whose disruption could block mosquito reproduction.
