TY - JOUR T1 - Theoretical consequences of the Mutagenic Chain Reaction for manipulating natural populations JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/018986 SP - 018986 AU - Robert L. Unckless AU - Philipp W. Messer AU - Andrew G. Clark Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/05/05/018986.abstract N2 - 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. ER -