Thanks for sharing this helpful overview. I’m relatively uneducated about the scientific issues in question, but I’ve been reading a bit and had a few thoughts.
I’ve been a little skeptical at the proposed use of gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes. My fear is that we could be left with mosquitoes with evolutionary adaptations making them resistant to the biased inheritance aspect of gene drive technology, causing us to lose the ability to use a potentially precious tool in the fight against malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses. This seems to me like a plausible outcome given that there would be immense evolutionary pressure to evolve such adaptions.
The alternative, which you consider, is to make mosquitoes resistant to specific parasites such as malaria. You suggest that genetic load may cause parasite resistant mosquitoes to be selected against. However, there is some research that shows that malaria resistance increases the fitness of mosquitoes exposed to malaria:
Even if this turns out to be wrong and such malaria-resistant mosquitoes incur a selective disadvantage, it seems less likely that the selective disadvantage would be so great that mosquitoes would evolve resistance to biased inheritance itself.
Given these considerations, isn’t starting out with using gene drives to engineer malaria resistant mosquitoes a safer approach than using gene drives to attempt to eliminate mosquito populations?
Thanks for sharing this helpful overview. I’m relatively uneducated about the scientific issues in question, but I’ve been reading a bit and had a few thoughts.
I’ve been a little skeptical at the proposed use of gene drives to eliminate mosquitoes. My fear is that we could be left with mosquitoes with evolutionary adaptations making them resistant to the biased inheritance aspect of gene drive technology, causing us to lose the ability to use a potentially precious tool in the fight against malaria and other mosquito-borne illnesses. This seems to me like a plausible outcome given that there would be immense evolutionary pressure to evolve such adaptions.
The alternative, which you consider, is to make mosquitoes resistant to specific parasites such as malaria. You suggest that genetic load may cause parasite resistant mosquitoes to be selected against. However, there is some research that shows that malaria resistance increases the fitness of mosquitoes exposed to malaria:
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/13/5580.full
Even if this turns out to be wrong and such malaria-resistant mosquitoes incur a selective disadvantage, it seems less likely that the selective disadvantage would be so great that mosquitoes would evolve resistance to biased inheritance itself.
Given these considerations, isn’t starting out with using gene drives to engineer malaria resistant mosquitoes a safer approach than using gene drives to attempt to eliminate mosquito populations?
Avi