press release<\/a> provides more: “The protective effect of naturally occurring genetic variation is strong enough to overcome the use of ‘gene drives’ based on CRISPR-based technology — unless a gene drive is matched to the genetic background of a specific target population, Wade added. Gene drives refer to genes that spread at a rate of nearly 90% — significantly higher than the normal 50% chance of inherence that occurs in sexually reproducing organisms.<\/p>\n“Wade, an expert in ‘selfish genes’ that function similarly to gene drives due to their ‘super-Darwinian’ ability to rapidly spread throughout a population, teamed up with colleagues at IU — including Gabriel E Zentner, an expert in CRISPR-based genetic tools and assistant professor in the Department of Biology — to explore the effectiveness of CRISPR-based population control in flour beetles, a species estimated to destroy 20% of the world’s grain after harvest.<\/p>\n
“The team designed CRISPR-based interventions that targeted three segments in the genome of the flour beetle from four parts of the world: India, Spain, Peru, and Indiana. They then analyzed the DNA of all four varieties of beetle and found naturally occurring variants in the targeted gene sequence, the presence of which would impact the effectiveness of the CRISPR-based technology.<\/p>\n
“The analysis revealed genetic variation in all four species at nearly every analyzed DNA segment, including a variance rate as high as 28% in the Peruvian beetles. Significantly, Wade’s statistical analysis found that a genetic variation rate as low as 1% — combined with a rate of inbreeding typical to mosquitos in the wild — was enough to eliminate any CRISPR-based population-control methods in six generations.”<\/p>\n
Which effectively means that the potential uses of the tech aren’t what they have been assumed to be.<\/p>\n
So, sure, someone can make a glow-in-the-dark bunny, or maybe a weird “look-at-what-I-can-do” hybrid animal, but actually effectively going to war with insect pests and\/or microbes, and winning over anything but the extremely short-term? That’s not going to happen. It’s a sales gimmick.<\/p>\n
That said, the researchers involved don’t seem to draw the same conclusion, and Wade instead states: “Based on this study, anyone trying to reduce insect populations through this method should conduct a thorough genetic analysis of the target gene region to assess variation rates. This will help predict the effectiveness of the method, as well as provide insight into ways to circumvent natural genetic variation through the use of Cas9 variants with an altered sequence specificity.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Arguments for and against the use of genetic modification techniques in the agricultural and healthcare\/disease-prevention sectors typically focus on potential impacts to human health, and\/or to wider ecosystems and natural services (a much more important area to watch, in my opinion than human health). My issue with genetic modification and the use of genetically modified 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My issue with genetic modification and the use of genetically modified…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46639"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/118"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=46639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=46639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=46639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/planetsave.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=46639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}