The paper about the flies is from 1992. Drosophila melanogaster still seems to be around and was not driven to extinction. Is there something we can learn from that about gene drives?
A naturally occurring gene drive features a “selfish gene” rapidly spreading itself through the population of a species. For instance, we could engineer a gene drive that rapidly turns a whole mosquito species purple. Gene drives that lead to species extinction are a subset of all possible gene drives.
Transposons don’t stop if they have one copy per individual in a species. They continuously increase their copies per chromosome.
Most species have evolved ways to suppress transposon activity for the transposons that are native to that species. If you add a new transposon for which you don’t have any suppression systems that can plausibly make the species extinct.
The abstract of the paper does discuss this:
These results provide new insight into the process of a transposon’s invasion into a new species and the potential risk of extinction such an invasion might entail.
Generally, it’s quite surprising that we see a newly inserted transposon family in a species with 50 transposon families in one of our core model organisms if you assume that species survive a majority of insertions of new transposons.
The paper about the flies is from 1992. Drosophila melanogaster still seems to be around and was not driven to extinction. Is there something we can learn from that about gene drives?
Most gene drives wont render the females (and only the females) sterile.
A naturally occurring gene drive features a “selfish gene” rapidly spreading itself through the population of a species. For instance, we could engineer a gene drive that rapidly turns a whole mosquito species purple. Gene drives that lead to species extinction are a subset of all possible gene drives.
Transposons don’t stop if they have one copy per individual in a species. They continuously increase their copies per chromosome.
Most species have evolved ways to suppress transposon activity for the transposons that are native to that species. If you add a new transposon for which you don’t have any suppression systems that can plausibly make the species extinct.
The abstract of the paper does discuss this:
Generally, it’s quite surprising that we see a newly inserted transposon family in a species with 50 transposon families in one of our core model organisms if you assume that species survive a majority of insertions of new transposons.