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EDITING POPULATIONS. "The ability to edit populations of sexual species would offer substantial benefits to humanity and the environment. For example, RNA-guided gene drives could potentially prevent the spread of disease, support agriculture by reversing pesticide and herbicide resistance in insects and weeds, and control damaging invasive species." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

ECOLOGICAL ENGINEERING. "Gene drives may be capable of addressing ecological problems by altering entire populations of wild organisms, but their use has remained largely theoretical due to technical constraints. Here we consider the potential for RNA-guided gene drives based on the CRISPR nuclease Cas9 to serve as a general method for spreading altered traits through wild populations over many generations." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

"SUPPRESSION DRIVES reduce the size of the targeted population. These ‘genetic load’ drives would spread rapidly through minimally impaired heterozygotes when rare, and eventually cause the population to crash or even become extinct due to the accumulated load of recessive mutations." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

HOMING. "Because copying causes the fraction of offspring that inherit the cassette to be greater than 1/2, these genes can drive through a population even if they reduce the reproductive fitness of the individual organisms that carry them. Over many generations, this self-sustaining process can theoretically allow a gene drive to spread from a small number of individuals until it is present in all members of a population." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

GENE DRIVE. "Natural homing endonuclease genes exhibit drive by cutting the corresponding locus of chromosomes lacking them. This induces the cell to repair the break by copying the nuclease gene onto the damaged chromosome via homologous recombination. The copying process is termed ‘homing’, while the endonuclease-containing cassette that is copied is referred to as a ‘gene drive’ or simply a ‘drive’." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

France becomes first country to ban plastic cups and plates http://www.cnn.com/2016/09/19/europe/france-bans-plastic-cups-plates/index.html View in LinkedIn

"WOLBACHIA are common intracellular bacteria that are found in arthropods and nematodes. These alphaproteobacteria endosymbionts are transmitted vertically through host eggs and alter host biology in diverse ways. Within arthropods, Wolbachia is a reproductive parasite, manipulating the reproductive biology of hosts to increase its own transmission. Although usually vertically inherited, Wolbachia can also move horizontally across species boundaries, resulting in a widespread and global distribution in diverse invertebrate hosts." https://lnkd.in/ekadN4H View in LinkedIn

SELECTIVE CONSTRAINT. "These findings imply that the CNGs are subject to a very strong and continual selective constraint, enabling them to remain largely unchanged for as long as 300 million years." (CNG = conserved nongenic (non-gene) sequences). https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn

SUCCESS STRATEGY #5: "heritable microbes such as Wolbachia." https://lnkd.in/ewXxsGD View in LinkedIn

FIDELITY. "The faithfulness of conservation which this study observed in the CNGs is unprecedented. The most highly conserved ones have a nucleotide substitution rate, across the studied mammals, that is less than half that of protein-coding genes." (CNG = conserved nongenic (non-gene).sequences). https://lnkd.in/eFvUyrd View in LinkedIn