Question

Ethan Bier’s gene drive and Tim Lu’s M13 therapies both introduce payload genes into bacterial cells. Why might the gene drive therapy result in a more permanent solution to antibiotic resistance?

Answer 1

A gene drive is a genetic engineering technology that puts and enhance a particular suite of genes throughout a population by altering the probability that a specific allele will be transmitted to offspring from the natural 50% probability. Gene drives can arise through a variety of mechanisms. They have been proposed to provide an effective means of genetically modifying specific populations and entire species. A gene drive defies Mendelian inheritance. Instead of one of a pair of genes coming from the father and one from the mother, both copies are from one parent. In a simple way, it can be understood as by removing a letter in a sentence and replacing it with any letter from the word below.

Recent encouragement for CRISPR-based gene drive has been provided by proof-of-principle studies showing that the type II CRISPR system from Streptococcus pyogenes can be modified to target endogenous genes in bacteria that can target antibiotic resistance.