[ExI] crispr question

[John Clark]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2016 at 1:01 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

​To me one of the most interesting things about CRISPR is that we can use
it to enable Gene Drive. Normally there is only a 50% chance that a
particular gene in an individual will end up in one of its offspring,  so
if you engineer a gene that is harmful the animal could not compete with
its natural counterparts and so the artificial gene would soon disappear
from the genepool; but with gene drive you can increase the odds it will be
inherited from 50% to 100% and you've short circuited Evolution. Even if
the gene makes an individual less competitive it will spread through a
population like wildfire in just a few generations. You could use this
technique to make mosquitoes extinct.

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/600689/we-have-the-technology-to-destroy-all-zika-mosquitoes/


 John K Clark







>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20160407/94a4e53a/attachment.html>