Friendly mosquitos, conceptual image. Computer illustration of 'friendly' mosquitos representing their use in 'gene drive'. Mosquitos are vectors of various diseases, helping them to be transmitted from one human to another. Gene drive is the practice of stimulating biased inheritance of particular genes to alter entire populations. It has been proposed as a technique for changing wild populations of harmful organisms such as mosquitoes to be less dangerous and is being proposed as an option for dealing with the Zika virus.