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Schematic diagrams of the two-locus engineered underdominance (top left) and the killer-rescue (top right) gene drive systems.

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posted on 2018-03-23, 17:23 authored by Matthew P. Edgington, Luke S. Alphey

Each system comprises of two independently inherited transgenic constructs carrying different configurations of lethal (killer), suppressor (rescue) and cargo (refractory) genes. In the case of engineered underdominance each construct carries a lethal gene, the cargo (refractory) gene and a suppressor of the lethal at the other locus. This differs from the killer-rescue system in which one construct carries a killer gene while the other carries the suppressor and a cargo (refractory) gene. The engineered underdominance system considered here can be thought of as two orthogonal killer-rescue systems split across two transgenic constructs. The engineered underdominance system has been shown to be threshold dependent (bottom left) and persist in time (i.e. it is self-sustaining) whereas the killer-rescue (bottom right) system initially increases in frequency before being eliminated from the population (i.e. it is self-limiting, even in absence of genetic changes such as resistant alleles or mutation of system components).

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