RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Theoretical consequences of the Mutagenic Chain Reaction for manipulating natural populations
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 018986
DO 10.1101/018986
A1 Robert L. Unckless
A1 Philipp W. Messer
A1 Andrew G. Clark
YR 2015
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018986.abstract
AB The use of recombinant genetic technologies for population manipulation has mostly remained an abstract idea due to the lack of a suitable means to drive novel gene constructs to high frequency in populations. Recently Gantz and Bier showed that the use of CRISPR/Cas9 technology could provide an artificial drive mechanism, the so-called Mutagenic Chain Reaction (MCR), which could lead to rapid fixation of even a deleterious introduced allele. We establish the equivalence of this system to models of meiotic drive and review the results of simple models showing that, when there is a fitness cost to the MCR allele, an internal equilibrium exists that is usually unstable. Introductions must be at a frequency above this critical point for the successful invasion of the MCR allele. These modeling results have important implications for application of MCR in natural populations.