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My name is Nikolai Windbichler.
I'm a researcher at
Imperial College London,
and I work on malaria control.
This talk is about
Integral Gene Drives
for Malaria Control.
0:13
If you have followed
this series,
then you're probably
familiar with this slide.
Gene drives are traits that
are preferentially inherited.
You can see on the left side,
normal Mendelian inheritance.
You can see that
this trait is inherited
50% of the time,
and therefore,
it doesn't increase in
frequency in the population.
On the right side, we
have a gene drive trait.
This has a high chance
of being inherited,
in the best case, 100%.
As you can see, this trait is
increasingly getting more and
more frequent in the population.
Now, there are many naturally
occurring gene drives,
but this presentation is
about engineered gene drives.
0:55
Engineered gene drives
could be used to
modify wild populations.
If we can build a
gene drive trait,
there are certain things that
we can do with it,
and this is shown on this slide.
It is a strategy called
population suppression.
In this case, we release an engineered
gene drive into a population.
It spreads and at the same time,
it does something that
reduces the fitness of
the target organism
in this population.
The outcome would be that
the population size
will be reduced.
If this organism is
a disease-transmitting
vector, for example,
that would also reduce
disease transmission.
We have another strategy which
is called population
modification or
sometimes referred to as
population replacement.
In this case,
the gene drive spreads
through the population but
it doesn't reduce
the population size.
Instead, it carries along
another trait that,
for example, if they
are malaria vectors,
makes these insects less good
at transmitting the disease.
You will see the two
strategies mentioned in
almost every gene
drive publication.
