Keywords: Homing

Manipulating the Destiny of Wild Populations Using CRISPR

Raban R, Marshall JM, Hay BA, Akbari OS.,  Annual Reviews,  57:361-390. 2023.
Genetic biocontrol aims to suppress or modify populations of species to protect public health, agriculture, and biodiversity. Advancements in genome engineering technologies have fueled a surge in research in this field, with one gene editing technology, CRISPR, leading the ...
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Rapid, scalable, combinatorial genome engineering by marker-less enrichment and recombination of genetically engineered loci in yeast

M. Abdullah, B. M. Greco, J. M. Laurent, R. K. Garge, D. R. Boutz, M. Vandeloo, E. M. Marcotte and A. H. Kachroo,  Cell Rep Methods,  3:100464. 2023.
A major challenge to rationally building multi-gene processes in yeast arises due to the combinatorics of combining all of the individual edits into the same strain. Here, we present a precise and multi-site genome editing approach that combines all edits without selection ...
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Modelling homing suppression gene drive in haplodiploid organisms

Y. Liu and J. Champer,  Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,  289:20220320. 2022.
Gene drives have shown great promise for suppression of pest populations.These engineered alleles can function by a variety of mechanisms, but themost common is the CRISPR homing drive, which converts wild-type allelesto drive alleles in the germline of heterozygotes. Some ...
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Modelling homing suppression gene drive in haplodiploid organisms

Y. Liu and J. Champer,  bioRxiv,  2021.10.12.464047. 2022.
Gene drives have shown great promise for suppression of pest populations. These engineered alleles can function by a variety of mechanisms, but the most common is the CRISPR homing drive, which converts wild-type alleles to drive alleles in the germline of heterozygotes. Some ...
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Modeling homing suppression gene drive in haplodiploid organisms

Y. Liu and J. Champer,  bioRxiv,  2021.10.12.464047. 2021.
Gene drives have shown great promise for suppression of pest populations. These engineered alleles can function by a variety of mechanisms, but the most common is the CRISPR homing drive, which converts wild-type alleles to drive alleles in the germline of heterozygotes. Some ...
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Analysis of off-target effects in CRISPR-based gene drives in the human malaria mosquito

W. T. Garrood, N. Kranjc, K. Petri, D. Y. Kim, J. A. Guo, A. M. Hammond, I. Morianou, V. Pattanayak, J. K. Joung, A. Crisanti and A. Simoni,  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,  118:e2004838117. 2021.
CRISPR-Cas9 nuclease-based gene drives have been developed toward the aim of control of the human malaria vector Anopheles gambiae. Gene drives are based on an active source of Cas9 nuclease in the germline that promotes super-Mendelian inheritance of the transgene by ...
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A homing suppression gene drive with multiplexed gRNAs maintains high drive conversion efficiency and avoids functional resistance alleles

E. Yang, M. Metzloff, A. M. Langmüller, A. G. Clark, P. W. Messer and J. Champer,  bioRxiv,  2021.05.27.446071. 2021.
Gene drives are engineered alleles that can bias inheritance in their favor, allowing them to spread throughout a population. They could potentially be used to modify or suppress pest populations, such as mosquitoes that spread diseases. CRISPR/Cas9 homing drives, which copy ...
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Small-Cage Laboratory Trials of Genetically-Engineered Anopheline Mosquitoes

R. Carballar-Lejarazú, T. B. Pham, V. Bottino-Rojas, A. Adolfi and A. A. James,  J Vis Exp,  2021.
Control of mosquito-borne pathogens using genetically-modified vectors has been proposed as a promising tool to complement conventional control strategies. CRISPR-based homing gene drive systems have made transgenic technologies more accessible within the scientific community. ...
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Engineering the Composition and Fate of Wild Populations with Gene Drive

B. A. Hay, G. Oberhofer and M. Guo,  Annual Review of Entomology,  2020.
We describe technologies under consideration, progress that has been made, and remaining technological hurdles, particularly with respect to evolutionary stability and our ability to control the spread and ultimate fate of genes introduced into populations.
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Small-Molecule Control of Super-Mendelian Inheritance in Gene Drives

V. López Del Amo, B. S. Leger, K. J. Cox, S. Gill, A. L. Bishop, G. D. Scanlon, J. A. Walker, V. M. Gantz and A. Choudhary,  Cell Reports,  31:107841. 2020.
Summary Synthetic CRISPR-based gene-drive systems have tremendous potential in public health and agriculture, such as for fighting vector-borne diseases or suppressing crop pest populations. These elements can rapidly spread in a population by breaching the inheritance limit of ...
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Gene drive outcomes not determined by genetic variation – A Podcast

Thomas Locke,  Malaria Minute,  2020.
Gene drives are a system of genetic modification that use ‘molecular scissors’ to edit DNA sequences that self-perpetuate to ensure the rapid spread of mutation in a population. They offer new avenues for eradicating vector-borne diseases like malaria. They rely on the Cas9 ...
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Super-Mendelian inheritance mediated by CRISPR-Cas9 in the female mouse germline

H. A. Grunwald, V. M. Gantz, G. Poplawski, X.-r. S. Xu, E. Bier and K. L. Cooper,  TAGC 2020,  2020.
A gene drive biases the transmission of one of the two copies of a gene such that it is inherited more frequently than by random segregation. Highly efficient gene drive systems that have recently been developed in insects, which leverage the sequence-targeted DNA cleavage ...
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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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Gene drives do not always increase in frequency: from genetic models to risk assessment

de Jong, TJ,  Journal Fur Verbraucherschutz Und Lebensmittelsicherheit-Journal of Consumer Protection and Food Safety,  12:299-307. 2017.
Homing genes encode endonucleases that make a double stranded break in the DNA, destroying a target site on the homologous chromosome. When the cell repairs the break the homing allele is copied, converting a heterozygote into a homozygote. This results in gene drive (GD), an ...
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What is a Gene Drive?

STAT,  STAT,  2015.
This video produced by STAT, an e-news site focusing on health and medicine (https://www.statnews.com/). This video simply illustrates what geneticists mean by gene drive, and how homing-based gene drive work. (Note: it does not indicate that there are other mechanisms of gene ...
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Site-specific selfish genes as tools for the control and genetic engineering of natural populations

Burt, A,  Proceedings of the Royal Society B-Biological Sciences,  270:921-928. 2003.
Site-specific selfish genes exploit host functions to copy themselves into a defined target DNA sequence, and include homing endonuclease genes, group II introns and some LINE-like transposable elements. If such genes can be engineered to target new host sequences, then they can ...
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