Engineering the composition and fate of wild populations with Medea and ClvR: key characteristics of Medea and ClvR

Published on May 31, 2023   38 min

A selection of talks on Plant & Animal Sciences

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0:00
Welcome to HSTalks. My name is Bruce Hay. What I want to do today is to introduce you to two gene drive mechanisms. Medea, the first gene drive mechanism synthesized, and the second one that we generated more recently called ClvR.
0:22
If we go to the first slide, what you see here is the pattern of air traffic throughout the world. This really is meant to emphasize the extent of globalization, that we have plants, animals, people, their pathogens and symbionts moving all over the world.
0:40
On the next slide, you see the same phenomenon now shown with shipping traffic. Again, plants, animals, their pathogens and symbionts go everywhere.
0:53
On the next slide, you see that a consequence of that is that invasive species end up being moved all over the world. Invasive species is essentially a plant, animal, or some other organism including microorganisms that ends up in an inappropriate environment and ends up thriving in that environment, often times in a way that results in damage to the existing environment, and/or crops, animals, plants or people.
1:25
What we end up with as a result of all of this is that we have pests, pathogens, invasive species, disease vectors and weeds ending up in inappropriate places throughout the world. All of this then results in plant, animal, human disease and crop loss, ecosystem degradation, and loss of beneficial and other endangered species. What this leads to then is it creates a kind of sand in the gears of the well-functioning workings of the world. It just gums things up, creates a lot of waste, damage, and in some cases loss of species.
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Engineering the composition and fate of wild populations with Medea and ClvR: key characteristics of Medea and ClvR

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