Researchers Call for Standards for Genetically Engineered Insects

New research published in the journal Ecology and Evolution details a novel approach to identifying potential ecological impacts brought on by genetically engineered insects.

Generically engineered, or GE, insects have the potential to mitigate disease and reshape pest management standards, but like any new technology, the full impact of deploying it is not fully understood. Researchers from the University of Minnesota have been studying GE insects in order to better understand the full implications of their introduction into ecosystems, and suggest that there should be standards put in place to regulate their use.

"When new technology is developed, you want to make sure it's safe," said Amy Morey, a doctoral student in the UM Department of Entomology who contributed to the research. "You want to know what could happen when you release these novel organisms into the environment."

Morey said that because the use of GE insects for things such as pest management and fighting insect borne human diseases is so new, there is no standard way of evaluating it yet.

"Our project is trying to get it a little bit further into a standardization -- a framework for how do you go about systematically evaluating a new technology so you're looking at all the sorts of different interactions that could possibly happen," Morey said.

A potentially useful example of a GE insect is the Anopheles gambiae mosquito. As a vector for malaria, the mosquito the insect has the potential to cause disease in human communities. By engineering the mosquito to suppress the spread of malaria, there could be a significant human health impact.

Many GE insect risk assessments only look at the end result, said Aaron David, a doctoral student in the UM Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior. David said his team's approach looks at the short term effects brought on while the GE insect is in the transitory phase, as well as what happens in the long term.

"The population isn't the same the whole time. You do have these transitory phases where the potential effects could be quite different than the effects during the steady state phase," said Joe Kaser, a doctoral student in the UM Department of Entomology. "Our framework really tries to evaluate the entire range of potential effects," he said, adding that many risk assessments only look at the end result.

The research not only sought to identify possible ecological impacts made by GE insects, but also addressed gaps in what is known about mosquito ecology.

"While there's an amazing and impressive amount of research that's been done on mosquitoes, there wasn't a whole lot of information about how they might be important ecologically," Kaser said.

David added: "The idea is that there isn't much info on what happens when you release a GE organism so we drew upon other literature to get at the answer of what happens when you peturb populations."

The doctoral students were the recipients of National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeships, the NSF's flagship interdisciplinary training program educating US Ph.D. scientists and engineers.