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from the would-have-gotten-away-with-it-hadn't-been-for-those-pesky-mosquitoes dept.
Recently touted as a solution for mosquito borne illnesses like zika, dengue and chikayunga - gene driving mosquito populations to infertility isn't working out so great in the wild.
In late 2015, researchers reported a CRISPR gene drive that caused an infertility mutation in female mosquitoes to be passed on to all their offspring1. Lab experiments showed that the mutation increased in frequency as expected over several generations, but resistance to the gene drive also emerged, preventing some mosquitoes from inheriting the modified genome.
This is hardly surprising, says Philipp Messer, a population geneticist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Just as antibiotics enable the rise of drug-resistant bacteria, population-suppressing gene drives create the ideal conditions for resistant organisms to flourish.
One source of this resistance is the CRISPR system itself, which uses an enzyme to cut a specific DNA sequence and insert whatever genetic code a researcher wants. Occasionally, however, cells sew the incision back together after adding or deleting random DNA letters. This can result in a sequence that the CRISPR gene-drive system no longer recognizes, halting the spread of the modified code.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @11:58AM
> tl;dr: There's a virus in the virus that we introduced while trying to wipe out the virus.
That's not it at all. CRISPR only deletes genes, it does not add them.
This is about the DNA spontaneously repairing itself in some small number of cases and apparently that repairability is heritable.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @02:44PM
Well CRISPR splices genes at select locations. Genes can then be added in place of where a gene was spliced.
Anyways I was wondering how something like this will work long term. It may work at first but you're always going to have mosquitoes that don't acquire the gene and natural selection will favor them. So the modified mosquitoes will die off and the ones that aren't modified will survive. I guess they will have to keep on inserting modified mosquitoes into the environment which has its own associated costs. It's not a one time solution, it's a solution where they keep getting paid to keep inserting new mosquitoes into the environment.
and now it's a great solution because now when the mosquitoes build resistance they suddenly create a brand new solution that they can once again get a new patent on. Why strive for a more permanent long term solution when you can just keep getting temporarily solutions that will only work short term and then get a new patent on new solutions when the old ones eventually fail due to resistance. It's the patent system at work.