Fu Guoliang, Condon Kirsty C, Epton Matthew J, Gong Peng, Jin Li, Condon George C, Morrison Neil I, Dafa'alla Tarig H, Alphey Luke
Oxitec Limited, 71 Milton Park, Oxford OX14 4RX, UK.
Nat Biotechnol. 2007 Mar;25(3):353-7. doi: 10.1038/nbt1283. Epub 2007 Feb 18.
The Sterile Insect Technique is a species-specific and environmentally friendly method of pest control involving mass release of sterilized insects that reduce the wild population through infertile matings. Insects carrying a female-specific autocidal genetic system offer an attractive alternative to conventional sterilization methods while also eliminating females from the release population. We exploited sex-specific alternative splicing in insects to engineer female-specific autocidal genetic systems in the Mediterranean fruit fly, Ceratitis capitata. These rely on the insertion of cassette exons from the C. capitata transformer gene into a heterologous tetracycline-repressible transactivator such that the transactivator transcript is disrupted in male splice variants but not in the female-specific one. As the key components of these systems function across a broad phylogenetic range, this strategy addresses the paucity of sex-specific expression systems (e.g., early-acting, female-specific promoters) in insects other than Drosophila melanogaster. The approach may have wide applicability for regulating gene expression in other organisms, particularly for combinatorial control with appropriate promoters.
昆虫不育技术是一种针对特定物种且环保的害虫防治方法，涉及大量释放经绝育的昆虫，通过不育交配减少野生种群数量。携带雌性特异性自杀基因系统的昆虫为传统绝育方法提供了一种有吸引力的替代方案，同时还能从释放种群中消除雌性个体。我们利用昆虫中性别特异性可变剪接，在地中海实蝇（Ceratitis capitata）中构建了雌性特异性自杀基因系统。这些系统依赖于将来自地中海实蝇transformer基因的盒式外显子插入到一个异源四环素可抑制反式激活因子中，使得反式激活因子转录本在雄性剪接变体中被破坏，而在雌性特异性变体中不受影响。由于这些系统的关键组件在广泛的系统发育范围内起作用，该策略解决了除黑腹果蝇外其他昆虫中性别特异性表达系统（如早期作用的、雌性特异性启动子）匮乏的问题。该方法可能在调控其他生物体基因表达方面具有广泛适用性，特别是与合适的启动子进行组合控制时。
