Adult females or larvae of many insect species transmit diseases or reduce agricultural output. Although many such species have been targets of population control, few are indeed under complete control by current methods, and new approaches are constantly being required. A still unexplored but interesting approach would be to introduce—via transgenesis—artificial toxic-to-females proteins as ejaculate components of male insects.

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During copulation, the transgenic males would transfer the insecticidal seminal proteins into the reproductive tract of their mates. There, the toxins would act to kill or sterilize the target females.

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The approach could be used to improve the efficiency of the Sterile Insect Technique or be placed in a self-propagating binary gene drive system (for more details see this Proposal). Currently, we are testing the feasibility of the idea in the model Drosophila melanogaster.