AUTHOR=Marshall John M. , Raban Robyn R. , Kandul Nikolay P. , Edula Jyotheeswara R. , León Tomás M. , Akbari Omar S. TITLE=Winning the Tug-of-War Between Effector Gene Design and Pathogen Evolution in Vector Population Replacement Strategies JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics VOLUME=10 YEAR=2019 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2019.01072 DOI=10.3389/fgene.2019.01072 ISSN=1664-8021 ABSTRACT=
While efforts to control malaria with available tools have stagnated, and arbovirus outbreaks persist around the globe, the advent of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)-based gene editing has provided exciting new opportunities for genetics-based strategies to control these diseases. In one such strategy, called “population replacement”, mosquitoes, and other disease vectors are engineered with effector genes that render them unable to transmit pathogens. These effector genes can be linked to “gene drive” systems that can bias inheritance in their favor, providing novel opportunities to replace disease-susceptible vector populations with disease-refractory ones over the course of several generations. While promising for the control of vector-borne diseases on a wide scale, this sets up an evolutionary tug-of-war between the introduced effector genes and the pathogen. Here, we review the disease-refractory genes designed to date to target