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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: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday February 11 2017, @05:18PM
What they are saying is that it seems that modifying things can produce unwanted results.
Why are we continuing to feck with things when past experience has shown us that we can expect the unexpected, especially when the only reason for fecking with them is to increase a corporations profits?
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---