Effective mosquito population suppression has been repeatedly demonstrated in field trials through the release of male mosquitoes to induce sterile mating with wild females using the incompatible insect technique (IIT), the sterile insect technique (SIT), or their combination. However, upscaling these techniques requires a highly efficient and scalable approach for the sex separation of mass-reared mosquitoes to minimize the unintentional release of females, which can lead to either population replacement or biting nuisance, a major bottleneck up to now. Here, we report the successful development of an automated mosquito pupa sex sorter that can effectively separate large numbers of males from females for population suppression of Aedes aegypti , A. albopictus , and Culex quinquefasciatus . The male production capacity of the automated sex sorter was increased by ~17-fold compared with manual sex separation with the Fay-Morlan sorter and enabled one person to separate 16 million males per week. With ~0.5% female contamination, the produced males exhibited high flight ability and mating performance. The field trial demonstrates that the quality of A. albopictus males produced using the automated sex sorter is suitable for inducing population suppression. These results indicate that the automated sex sorter offers the potential to upscale IIT and SIT against mosquito vectors for disease control.

中文翻译：

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使用自动蛹性分拣机扩大不育雄蚊的生产


在田间试验中，通过使用不相容昆虫技术 （IIT）、昆虫不育技术 （SIT） 或它们的组合释放雄性蚊子以诱导与野生雌性不育交配，有效地抑制蚊子种群。然而，扩大这些技术的规模需要一种高效且可扩展的方法来对大规模饲养的蚊子进行性别分离，以最大限度地减少雌性蚊子的无意释放，这可能导致种群更替或叮咬滋扰，这是迄今为止的主要瓶颈。在这里，我们报告了自动蚊蛹性分选机的成功开发，该分选机可以有效地将大量雄性与雌性分开，以抑制埃及伊蚊、白纹毛蛹和毛花库蚊的种群。与使用 Fay-Morlan 分拣机的手动性别分离相比，自动性别分拣机的雄性生产能力提高了 ~17 倍，使一个人每周能够分离 1600 万只雄性。在 ~0.5% 的雌性污染下，产生的雄性表现出高飞行能力和交配性能。田间试验表明，使用自动性别分选机生产的白纹 A. albopictus 雄性的质量适合诱导种群抑制。这些结果表明，自动性别分选机有可能扩大针对蚊媒的 IIT 和 SIT 以控制疾病。