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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:13PM
Yes, this is a case of the GMO failing, the point of the GMO was supposed to be to remove these types of mosquitoes from the ecosystem, not to render them immune to the tool.
Also, sexual reproduction generally results in a random distribution of damage, not just random base pairs being inserted in the same place. That's a very big difference, especially in this case where the mutation leads to the mosquitoes being immune to the technique.