(birds chirping)
- I get here before 7:00 every day
and actually seven days a week.
Seven days a week, yes.
365 days.
Yes, last time I had a break was 2017 September 5th.
It's just my routine.
It's like you may brush you teeth.
The same thing.
So I come, try to get done as much as possible
and Saturday, Sunday, holy day,
Christmas, New Years, every day.
We take care of insects
so we have to be with them too long.
It's like babies.
I have to take care of all the stages of mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes transmit diseases including dengue,
West Nile, and many encephalitis viruses.
And of course, in Africa, Southeast Asia,
and it's really deadly.
- [Narrator] Combined, the diseases
infect hundreds of millions of people a year
causing a host of maladies and birth defects
killing several million.
- So we tried to control their populations.
The quickest way to reduce the number of mosquitoes
are spraying the insecticides.
- [Narrator] Down like radar.
(loud explosion) (mosquitoes buzzing)
- [Jun] So that we directly kill mosquitoes
as well as any other non-target insect.
- [Narrator] Kills them dead.
(bubble popping)
- It's like cockroaches too.
I mean, I don't like cockroaches so I might spray.
- Mosquito population control does work.
Larvicides, mosquitocides, they do work.
The problem is
that they kill lots of things in the environment.
Mosquitoes get resistant.
And when they become resistant, they don't work anymore.
So it's very much like antibiotics.
There's always a need for new antibiotics.
There's always a need for new mosquitocides.
So really the question was
what could we target in the mosquito that (mumbling).
What could we do to try to find a weakness,
an Achilles' heel in this mosquito
that could lead to a compound
that would be biosafe and mosquito selective.
- [Jun] I have to take care of all the baby mosquitoes
and I will choose one of the genes I'm interested in
and start microinjecting mosquitoes.
- [Researcher] So we worked on a couple of proteins.
One was LCOP-1.
When we knocked it out, she took a blood meal
and when she took the blood meal,
her gut expanded and essentially exploded.
So it was blood-feeding induced mortality.
When she took the blood meal, she died.
So that was really cool.
But the protein is conserved.
Like we have the protein.
- Those proteins were actually present in other organisms
including honey bees, ladybugs,
dragonflies, and also humans.
So these are not great to target.
Since then, I decided to do a search
for mosquito specific proteins.
- The mosquito genome is known so Jun used the computer
and said here's the genome of mosquitoes
compared to all known genomes in the database.
And came up with 160 genes
that were not found in other organisms.
They didn't have names.
They just had numbers like AA,
you know, 605 or one or whatever.
They're called hypothetical proteins.
People had ignored them
because they said well, we don't know what they do.
Let's just leave them alone.
So Jun used a genetic technique
to knock them down one by one.
- I can inject probably three, four mosquitoes per minute.
Yes, I'm very fast, multitask.
- [Researcher] He set about and he came back in the office
about three or four months later
and he goes I think we found one.
We decided to name it.
Jun came up with the name.
Eggshell organizing factor one.
When the gene is knocked out
and the protein is not made,
so the EOF1 protein is deficient,
the eggshell looks fine inside the ovary.
So when Jun looks inside the mosquito,
the ovary looks pretty good.
The egg is forming, oocyte is forming.
But when she lays the egg,
the egg shell looks abnormal right away.
- I dissected close to 100 thousand mosquitoes,
dissections under microscope
and I've never seen such horrible eggs.
- [Researcher] It looks as though
something went terribly wrong.
The egg breaks open.
It's not completed.
It leaks.
The embryo's dead.
- Initially, I thought that was maybe some artifact
but I repeated it same experiment after experiment.
And then, yes, this is for real.
And then so excited, yes.
- So it looks like this could be the birth control
that would really help
to decrease populations of mosquitoes.
To wipe out all mosquitoes on the planet
is not only a bad idea, but it's probably impossible.
You're gonna get mutants that do all kinds of weird things.
But to target mosquitoes in areas where dengue,
Zika virus are wreaking havoc on humans
and causing human suffering, that's the target.
That will reduce human suffering.
That's what we want to do.
I think it's kind of five to 10 years
and we will probably target multiple other proteins
that we're discovering along the way.
The EOF1 was the tip of the iceberg
and there are potentially other proteins
that will make better targets.
So that takes time and Jun is making discoveries every day.
- Seven.
- Fascinating.
- As a biologist or a biochemist,
I mean you don't hit the home runs every day
like Babe Ruth or Hank Aaron.
The approach that we took is very high risk
but it's a high return project
if you really hit the goldmine.