Engineered Reproductively Isolated Species Drive Reversible Population Replacement
Engineered Reproductively Isolated Species Drive Reversible Population Replacement
Tags: Fruit fly, Gene drive synthetic, Genetic incompatibilities, Population modification/replacementA. Buchman, I. Shriner, T. Yang, J. Liu, I. Antoshechkin, J. M. Marshall, M. W. Perry and O. S. Akbari, bioRxiv, 2020.08.09.242982. 2020.
Engineered reproductive species barriers are useful for impeding gene flow and driving desirable genes into wild populations in a reversible threshold-dependent manner. However, methods to generate synthetic barriers have not been developed in advanced eukaryotes. To overcome this challenge, we engineered SPECIES (Synthetic Postzygotic barriers Exploiting CRISPR-based Incompatibilities for Engineering Species) to generate postzygotic reproductive barriers. Using this approach, we engineer multiple reproductively isolated SPECIES and demonstrate their threshold-dependent gene drive capabilities in D. melanogaster. Given the near-universal functionality of CRISPR tools, this approach should be portable to many species, including insect disease vectors in which confinable gene drives could be of great practical utility.
