PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - James E. DiCarlo AU - Alejandro Chavez AU - Sven L. Dietz AU - Kevin M. Esvelt AU - George M. Church TI - RNA-guided gene drives can efficiently and reversibly bias inheritance in wild yeast AID - 10.1101/013896 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 013896 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/19/013896.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/19/013896.full AB - Inheritance-biasing “gene drives” may be capable of spreading genomic alterations made in laboratory organisms through wild populations. We previously considered the potential for RNA-guided gene drives based on the versatile CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing system to serve as a general method of altering populations1. Here we report molecularly contained gene drive constructs in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae that are typically copied at rates above 99% when mated to wild yeast. We successfully targeted both non-essential and essential genes, showed that the inheritance of an unrelated “cargo” gene could be biased by an adjacent drive, and constructed a drive capable of overwriting and reversing changes made by a previous drive. Our results demonstrate that RNA-guided gene drives are capable of efficiently biasing inheritance when mated to wild-type organisms over successive generations.