Succeeded in evolving organisms with genome editing, just flies become `` flies that eat poison ''
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Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have successfully provided an unprecedented evolutionary advantage to Drosophila, a type of fly, using CRISPR , a type of genome editing technology. The research team has evolved Drosophila into “Drosophila with the ability to eat poison and store it in the body and protect it from predators” by making three small changes to the gene through genome editing.
Genome editing retraces the evolution of toxin resistance in the monarch butterfly | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1610-8/
CRISPR flies have been gene edited so they can eat poison
https://newatlas.com/biology/crispr-flies-gene-edited-eat-poison/
Milkweed plants produce a white latex when their stems are cut. This milk is toxic and milkweed is harmful to most animals and insects.
It is a milkweed that many animals and insects avoid because it is toxic, but monarch butterfly can ingest this poison and store it in the body, so it seems to lay eggs in milkweed at the time of spawning. By doing so, eggs are protected from external enemies and milkweed is using monarch butter as a pollinator. Also, monarch larvae eat milkweed to store toxins in the body and protect them from external enemies. In other words, towata with toxins and their pollinating organisms evolved while co-existing, and it can be said that monarch butterfly with the ability of “toxin tolerance” was born.
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However, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have succeeded in conferring Drosophila resistance to the same “Towata toxin” as monarch butterfly using genome editing techniques. The CRISPR used has been used for genetic editing of insects, mammals, and humans, but genome editing that gives `` new behavior and adaptation to the environment '' by acquiring resistance to poison is multicellular It seems to be the first time it has been given to living creatures. In this research, “new actions and adaptations to the environment” refers to “Drosophila storing toxins in the body and trying to protect themselves from external enemies”.
To make Drosophila resistant to milkweed toxins, the team tried to replicate genetic information related to the toxicity of monarch butterfly on the Drosophila gene. According to the research team, resistance to milkweed toxins is due to a single gene, so to give Drosophila similar resistance, it was only necessary to replace three nucleotides in the gene.
Genetically edited Drosophila larvae (maggots) can eat and reproduce milkweeds, thereby successfully storing toxins in the body. Furthermore, even when the maggots transformed and became Drosophila, they seemed to have maintained their resistance to poison. In addition, it became clear that the evolutionary Drosophila with tolerance of Towata toxin was 1000 times less sensitive to Towata toxin than wild Drosophila by causing mutational evolution through genome editing. It is.
Noah Whiteman, who led the research, said, “By changing only three points in the gene, we were able to create this evolved super Drosophila. But what surprised me the most was 'We were able to test the evolutionary hypothesis in a way that wasn't possible with anything other than a cell line, and without CRISPR's ability to create species mutations, it was difficult to reveal.' .
Milkweed toxins seem to upset the mechanism that properly maintains the balance of sodium ions in the body, but monarch butterflies have mutations that can circumvent this. In order to reproduce this mutation in Drosophila, it was necessary to make three genetic changes in a specific order. The team found that the first two mutations made Drosophila venom resistant and have a major impact on the nervous system. The last mutation offsets the negative effects caused by the two mutations, and only helps to maintain the resistance to milkweed toxins.
The result of this study is “not only understanding how evolution occurs in organisms, but also that genome editing can be used as a method to direct the evolution of new traits and behaviors. It has meaning, ”wrote
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