VATIS UPDATE Article

Researchers from University of Kansas (KU), the United States, and colleagues from Cornell University, the United States, have revealed daunting challenges to changing the DNA of entire populations of species via the most promising techniques available today to produce “gene drive.” For decades, scientists have proposed various methods of genetically altering natural populations to solve problems that plague human beings.

“A lot of times nature interferes with how humans would like the world to be. Good examples of that are pests in crops and insect-vectored diseases, like the Zika virus or dengue or malaria,” said Robert Unckless, at KU. Scientists gained a new edge with the advent of techniques using “selfish genes” that take advantage of natural elements to cheat genetic “Mendelian inheritance” – whereby offspring of modified and nonmodified organisms are just as likely to inherit traits from either parent – and overcome the fitness cost.

The KU researcher said by tying the mutation for shorter lifespan, or resistance to dengue fever in mosquitoes, for example, to one of these selfish genetic elements that can drive through populations, scientists found a way to overcome fitness cost. Unckless said despite its promise, the approach “more or less stalled out” until two years ago when researchers in California incorporated CRISPR/Cas9 into their gene drive constructs. Suddenly, dreams of creating super mosquitoes to eradicate disease were alive again.