Genetically engineered insects with sex-selection and genetic incompatibility enable population suppression
- University of Minnesota, United States
- Macquarie University, Australia
Abstract
Engineered Genetic Incompatibility (EGI) is a method to create species-like barriers to sexual reproduction. It has applications in pest control that mimic Sterile Insect Technique when only EGI males are released. This can be facilitated by introducing conditional female-lethality to EGI strains to generate a sex-sorting incompatible male system (SSIMS). Here, we demonstrate a proof of concept by combining tetracycline-controlled female lethality constructs with a pyramus-targeting EGI line in the model insect Drosophila melanogaster. We show that both functions (incompatibility and sex-sorting) are robustly maintained in the SSIMS line and that this approach is effective for population suppression in cage experiments. Further we show that SSIMS males remain competitive with wild-type males for reproduction with wild-type females, including at the level of sperm competition.
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Funding
Minnesota Invasive Terrestrial Plants and Pests Center, University of Minnesota
- Michael Smanski
Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
- Michael Smanski
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: Work with invertebrates (e.g. D. melanogaster) is exempt from the University of Minnesota's IACUC research oversight, however all work was approved by UMN's Institutional Biosafety Committee.
Copyright
© 2022, Upadhyay et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Genetically engineered insects with sex-selection and genetic incompatibility enable population suppression
eLife 11:e71230.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71230
