Han Yue, Champer Jackson
Center for Bioinformatics, Center for Life Sciences, School of Life Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China.
CLS Program, School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.
Mol Biol Evol. 2025 Mar 5;42(3). doi: 10.1093/molbev/msaf048.
Genetic control strategies are promising solutions for control of pest populations and invasive species. Methods utilizing repeated releases of males such as sterile insect technique (SIT), release of insects carrying a dominant lethal (RIDL), self-limiting gene drives, and gene disruptors are highly controllable methods, ensuring biosafety. Although models of these strategies have been built, detailed comparisons are lacking, particularly for some of the newer strategies. Here, we conducted a thorough comparative assessment of self-limiting genetic control strategies by individual-based simulation models. Specifically, we find that repeated releases greatly enhance suppression power of weak and self-limiting gene drives, enabling population elimination with even low efficiency and high fitness costs. Moreover, dominant female sterility further strengthens self-limiting systems that can either use gene drive or disruptors that target genes without a mechanism to bias their own inheritance. Some of these strategies are highly persistent, resulting in relatively low release ratios even when released males suffer high fitness costs. To quantitatively evaluate different strategies independent from ecological impact, we proposed constant-population genetic load, which achieves over 95% accuracy in predicting simulation outcomes for most strategies, though it is not as precise in a few frequency-dependent systems. Our results suggest that many new self-limiting strategies are safe, flexible, and more cost-effective than traditional SIT and RIDL, and thus have great potential for population suppression of insects and other pests.
遗传控制策略是控制害虫种群和入侵物种的有前景的解决方案。利用雄性多次释放的方法，如不育昆虫技术（SIT）、携带显性致死基因的昆虫释放（RIDL）、自限性基因驱动和基因干扰剂，是高度可控的方法，可确保生物安全。尽管已经建立了这些策略的模型，但缺乏详细的比较，特别是对于一些较新的策略。在这里，我们通过基于个体的模拟模型对自限性遗传控制策略进行了全面的比较评估。具体而言，我们发现多次释放极大地增强了弱自限性基因驱动的抑制能力，即使效率低且适应度成本高也能实现种群消除。此外，显性雌性不育进一步强化了自限性系统，该系统既可以使用基因驱动，也可以使用针对基因的干扰剂，而无需偏向自身遗传的机制。其中一些策略具有高度持久性，即使释放的雄性具有高适应度成本，释放比例也相对较低。为了独立于生态影响定量评估不同策略，我们提出了恒定种群遗传负荷，对于大多数策略，它在预测模拟结果时的准确率超过95%，尽管在一些频率依赖系统中它不够精确。我们的结果表明，许多新的自限性策略比传统的SIT和RIDL更安全、灵活且更具成本效益，因此在抑制昆虫和其他害虫种群方面具有巨大潜力。
