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CRISPR Could Create An Efficient Gene Drive in Flies

Researchers used CRISPR to speed the inheritance of specific genes in lab mice for the first time, demonstrating that gene drives work less efficiently in rodents than insects. The study aims to create novel lab mouse strains, not wipe out wild populations, and is an important step towards developing gene drive technology in mammals.

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25 views1 page

CRISPR Could Create An Efficient Gene Drive in Flies

Researchers used CRISPR to speed the inheritance of specific genes in lab mice for the first time, demonstrating that gene drives work less efficiently in rodents than insects. The study aims to create novel lab mouse strains, not wipe out wild populations, and is an important step towards developing gene drive technology in mammals.

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seq
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Researchers have used CRISPR, the genome editing tool, to speed the inheritance

of specific genes in mammals for the first time. Demonstrated in lab-reared insects
several years ago, this controversial “gene-drive” strategy promises the ability to
quickly spread a gene throughout an entire species. It has sparked dreams of
deploying lethal genes to eradicate pests such as malaria-carrying mosquitoes—and
now, perhaps, crop-damaging, disease-causing mammals such as rabbits, mice, and
rats.

The new research aims to create novel strains of lab mice, not wipe out wild
populations, and it shows that gene drives work less efficiently in rodents than in
insects. Still, Paul Thomas, a molecular geneticist at the University of Adelaide in
Australia who is working on similar experiments, calls it an “important first step
towards development of gene drive technology in mammals.”

The study was posted 4 July on bioRxiv, an online site for preprints, by a team at the
University of California, San Diego (UCSD), led by geneticist Kimberly Cooper. The
researchers, among them Ethan Bier and Valentino Gantz, who 3 years ago showed
that CRISPR could create an efficient gene drive in flies, have submitted the
study to a peer-reviewed journal that asked them not to speak with media. But it has
already triggered plenty of scientific discussion. “It’s a very good study and it’s of
pretty high significance,” says Gaétan Burgio, a mouse geneticist at the John Curtin
School of Medical Research in Canberra, Australia, who tweeted a series of
comments about the report. “Nothing is really known about gene drives in rodents.
We all assumed the efficiency would be the same as in flies, but it turns out to be
very different.”

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