AS DENGUE fever struck Buenos Aires in Argentina for the first time this week, there is renewed hope that a drug to treat the 100 million people infected worldwide each year may one day be possible.
Mariano Garcia-Blanco of , North Carolina, and colleagues used RNA interference technology to “knock down” the activity of a gene in a fruit fly cell before exposing it to the dengue virus to assess the impact of this gene on infection. By repeating the experiment on each of the fruit fly’s 14,000 genes, they identified more than 100…
