Toxin-Antidote Elements Across the Tree of Life
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A. Burga, E. Ben-David and L. Kruglyak,
Annual Review Genetics,
54:387-415.
2020.
n life’s constant battle for survival, it takes one to kill but two to conquer. Toxin-antitoxin or toxin-antidote (TA) elements are genetic dyads that cheat the laws of inheritance to guarantee their transmission to the next generation. This seemingly simple genetic arrangement-a toxin linked to its antidote-is capable of quickly spreading and persisting in natural populations. TA elements were first discovered in bacterial plasmids in the 1980s and have recently been characterized in fungi, plants, and animals, where they underlie genetic incompatibilities and sterility in crosses between wild isolates. In this review, we provide a unified view of TA elements in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic organisms and highlight their similarities and differences at the evolutionary, genetic, and molecular levels. Finally, we propose several scenarios that could explain the paradox of the evolutionary origin of TA elements and argue that these elements may be key evolutionary players and that the full scope of their roles is only beginning to be uncovered. More related to this: Design and analysis of CRISPR-based underdominance toxin-antidote gene drives Performance analysis of novel toxin-antidote CRISPR gene drive systems Split drive killer-rescue provides a novel threshold-dependent gene drive Poisons, antidotes, and selfish genes
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