TY - JOUR T1 - Engineering species-like barriers to sexual reproduction JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/079095 SP - 079095 AU - Maciej Maselko AU - Stephen C. Heinsch AU - Jeremy Chacón AU - William Harcombe AU - Michael J. Smanski Y1 - 2016/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/10/04/079095.1.abstract N2 - We introduce a novel approach to engineer a genetic barrier to sexual reproduction between otherwise compatible populations. Programmable transcription factors drive lethal gene expression in hybrid offspring following undesired mating events. As a proof of concept, we target the ACT1 promoter of the model organism Saccharomyces cerevisiae using a dCas9-based transcriptional activator. Lethal over-expression of actin results from mating this engineered strain with a strain containing the wild-type ACT1 promoter. ER -