Gene drive behavior when pest populations have age, mating and spatial structure

Published on May 1, 2018   45 min

A selection of talks on Genetics & Epigenetics

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0:00
Hi, this is Fred Gould from North Carolina State University, and I'm giving this talk along with my co-author Alun Lloyd, who's in the Bio Math Department here, I'm in the Entomology and Plant Pathology Department. What I want to talk about is a gene drive behavior - when pest populations have age, mating, and spatial structure. This is because models can be used in lots of different ways, and have different purposes. When we are thinking of actually releasing gene drive, and want to understand this from a practical perspective, we need to recognize that there are life stages to all of these organisms and they move in different ways. That's what I'll be concentrating on.
0:43
So in the next slide though, I want to talk about gene drives in general. I'm sure if you've looked at the series, you've heard quite a bit, but just a general perspective here. So if we think of populations of wild insects, those are in the green here in the slide; and the release of a single individual with a gene drive, you see that in red; and of course I'm not really talking about a single one, but a small percentage of the population released that way. You can see that in this slide two sub-populations, one on the left; and one on the right. The release is into the one on the left, and if it's an unrestricted gene drive, that single individual will move those genes into that first population; and then they'll migrate into the second population, and then increase again into the second population; and so on, and if this is taken ad infinitum, assuming this is a perfect gene drive, it could spread throughout the range of that species.

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