Departamento de Ecología, Genética y Evolución, Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales, Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), CABA, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Instituto de Ecología, Genética y Evolución de Buenos Aires, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), CABA, Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Sci Rep. 2022 Apr 15;12(1):6332. doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-10327-4.
Gene drives can be highly effective in controlling a target population by disrupting a female fertility gene. To spread across a population, these drives require that disrupted alleles be largely recessive so as not to impose too high of a fitness penalty. We argue that this restriction may be relaxed by using a double gene drive design to spread a split binary expression system. One drive carries a dominant lethal/toxic effector alone and the other a transactivator factor, without which the effector will not act. Only after the drives reach sufficiently high frequencies would individuals have the chance to inherit both system components and the effector be expressed. We explore through mathematical modeling the potential of this design to spread dominant lethal/toxic alleles and suppress populations. We show that this system could be implemented to spread engineered seminal proteins designed to kill females, making it highly effective against polyandrous populations.
基因驱动可以通过破坏雌性生育基因来高效控制目标种群。为了在种群中传播，这些驱动需要破坏的等位基因主要是隐性的，以免造成过高的适应度惩罚。我们认为，通过使用双基因驱动设计来传播分裂的二元表达系统，可以放宽这种限制。一个驱动携带一个显性致死/毒性效应物，另一个携带转录激活因子，如果没有后者，效应物将不会起作用。只有当驱动达到足够高的频率时，个体才有机会遗传两个系统组件，并且效应物才能表达。我们通过数学建模来探索这种设计传播显性致死/毒性等位基因和抑制种群的潜力。我们表明，该系统可以用于传播旨在杀死雌性的工程精液蛋白，从而对多配偶种群产生高度有效的效果。
