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Framing Challenges and Opportunities for Canada: Expert Panel on Regulating Gene-Edited Organisms for Pest Control

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CCA (Council of Canadian Academies),  Framing Challenges and Opportunities for Canada,  2023.
Gene-editing technologies are changing approaches to pest management. Rapidly evolving but unproven gene-editing tools could potentially mitigate the impacts of pests in public health, conservation, and agricultural contexts. The use of these tools, however, is accompanied by ...

A toxin-antidote system contributes to interspecific reproductive isolation in rice

Shimin You, Zhigang Zhao, Xiaowen Yu, Shanshan Zhu, Jian Wang, Dekun Lei, Jiawu Zhou, Jing Li, Haiyuan Chen, Yanjia Xiao, Weiwei Chen, Qiming Wang, Jiayu Lu, Keyi Chen, Chunlei Zhou, Xin Zhang, Zhijun Cheng, Xiuping Guo, Yulong Ren, Xiaoming Zheng, Shijia,  Nature Communications,  14. 2023.
Breakdown of reproductive isolation facilitates flow of useful trait genes into crop plants from their wild relatives. Hybrid sterility, a major form of reproductive isolation exists between cultivated rice (Oryza sativa) and wild rice (O. meridionalis, Mer). Here, we report the ...

Aedes aegypti microbiome composition covaries with the density of Wolbachia infection

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Jane Pascar, Henry Middleton & Steve Dorus,  Microbiome,  11. 2023.
Wolbachia is a widespread bacterial endosymbiont that can inhibit vector competency when stably transinfected into the mosquito, Aedes aegypti, a primary vector of the dengue virus (DENV) and other arboviruses. Although a complete mechanistic understanding of pathogen blocking is ...

Meiotic drive, postzygotic isolation, and the Snowball Effect

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Robert L. Unckless,  bioRxiv,  2023.
As populations diverge, they accumulate incompatibilities which reduce gene flow and facilitate the formation of new species. Simple models suggest that the genes that cause Dobzhansky-Muller incompatibilities should accumulate at least as fast as the square of the number of ...

The suppression of a selfish genetic element increases a male’s mating success in a fly

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Sophie Lyth, Andrea J. Betancourt, Tom A. R. Price, Rudi L. Verspoor,  Ecology and Evolution,  2023.
X chromosome meiotic drive (XCMD) kills Y-bearing sperm during spermatogenesis, leading to the biased transmission of the selfish X chromosome. Despite this strong transmission, some natural XCMD systems remain at low and stable frequencies, rather than rapidly spreading through ...

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