Science Digest

Summary and analysis by subject matter experts

Gene Drive: Engineered viruses take on their own kind in a new study

Rizwan Choudhury,  Interesting Engineering,  2023.
Scientists are exploring a radical idea to combat viral infections: use viruses against themselves. They are testing whether introducing modified viruses into people with the same natural viruses can spread a gene that destroys the infection. This has yet to be done successfully ...
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Meeting Abstracts from the 5th B Chromosome Conference

Anonymous,  BMC Proceedings,  17. 2023.
During preparations for the 5th B-Chromosome Conference (5BCC), rapid and significant progress was observed in the germ-restricted chromosomes (GRCs) study. GRCs are additional chromosomes found only in germ cells and are eliminated from somatic cells in many avian and dipteran ...
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A Multiple Gene Drive System

Ferdinand Nanfack Minkeu,  IGTRCN,  2019.
Yan & Finnigan, (2018) recently published a paper in Scientific Reports describing an artificial multi-locus gene drive system by using a single Cas9 and three guide RNA (gRNA) in the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Nuclease-based gene drives do not follow the typical ...
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Multiplexing gRNAs to Hedge Against Resistance to Gene Drive

Travis Van Warmerdam,  IGTRCN,  2018.
Recently, Oberhofer et al (2018) published a paper examining the mechanisms of homing endonuclease gene drives in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They used a novel nuclease-encoding cassette containing four multiplexed gRNAs targeting genes required for ...
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Cas9 Gene Drive, Sex-Conversion and Evolved Resistance

Anna Buchman,  IGTRCN,  2018.
In a recent manuscript, KaramiNejadRanjbar et al. demonstrate the development of a proof of principle Cas9-based suppression gene drive in D. melanogaster that can be applied to pest insects, and discuss the implications of resistance allele formation for practical use of such a ...
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