[ExI] Terraforming Australia

[Rafal Smigrodzki]

On Sun, Dec 6, 2015 at 6:36 PM, Dan TheBookMan <danust2012 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> The fear would be accidentally eliminating something essential to the
> biosphere and human existence, no? For instance, can a gene drive used to
> get rid of a malarial spreading mosquito be prevented from spreading to
> other mosquitos? (I'm also wondering about good old Darwinian evolution
> working around the mechanism in this particular example. But, of course,
> that might be easier to deal with once you have the tools and knowledge.)
>

### You can design a reverse gene drive to render critters immune to a
released version.

A gene drive generally is transferred only to offspring, so it should not
find its way to other species, unless the species are capable of
interbreeding and producing viable offspring. This may be occasionally of
concern, for example if you try to use a gene drive to eliminate African
bees and end up wiping out European bees.

Evolution would of course find ways of incapacitating gene drives but I
think that the arms race between CRISPR designers and critters would be
mostly won by designers. You should be able to quickly design a counter to
conceivable evolved anti-CRISPR mechanisms. If a critter has a Dicer
mutation that directs it towards the RNA guides used by CRISPR, you just
disable Dicer. Etc.

Rafał
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