Modeling a Novel Gene Drive Targeting Immune Responses to Increase Confidence in Local Confinement

CaseyO'Brien

NCSU

"Modeling a Novel Gene Drive Targeting Immune Responses to Increase Confidence in Local Confinement"

Gene drive technologies hold promise for controlling invasive pests, mitigating disease transmission, and protecting local ecosystems and agriculture. However, their deployment hinges on resolving safety concerns, particularly the risk of unintended spread into non-target populations. Current confinement strategies rely largely on invasion thresholds which take advantage of unstable equilibrium points in allele frequency, below which the drive will not spread. This maintains local confinement by preventing migrants from spreading the drive in surrounding populations. While this is an effective strategy for gene drives meant to introduce a trait to a population, its success has been more limited in suppression gene drives. We circumvent this issue by designing a novel suppression drive system that targets the immune response of an organism to a local stressor (i.e., endemic virus, fungus, or a specialized parasitoid). The drive system increases the target organism’s susceptibility to the stressor by increasing the likelihood of acquiring the infection or the impact of infection on the organism. This means that the drive system’s fitness cost is dependent on the abundance of the stressor. We model several drive systems to consider the efficacy of the system in different settings.
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