Designed to push new genes through entire populations in the wild, gene drive technology raises serious questions about monitoring, reversibility, and human control of nature
Watershed Sentinel 13 July 2021
By Lucy Sharratt
So far, genetically engineered organisms have been mostly limited to agricultural use, with partial success. Around the world, a few major crops (mostly corn, soy, and cotton) are genetically engineered, predominantly for herbicide tolerance and insect resistance. However, the newer techniques of genome editing (also called gene editing) mean that a much wider variety of organisms can now be genetically engineered, including for many purposes outside of food and farming.
This increased power is most dramatically illustrated in the development of gene drive technology. Unlike genetically engineered plants and animals intended for confined use in agricultural production, gene drive organisms are expressly designed for intentional, long-lived release into the wild.
Gene drives are a technology through which a few individual genetically engineered organisms would be deployed to intentionally push new genes through an entire population of a species in the wild or in a farm ecosystem. Through the gene drive mechanism, new genes would be inherited by all offspring in subsequent generations, not just the expected half in normal inheritance. When gene drive organisms reproduce, specific traits as well as the gene drive mechanism itself would be passed on.
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