Both the bug and the spider…
Japanese scientists have obtained the first GM cockroaches and beetles using CRISPR technology
Sergey Vasiliev, Naked Science
The CRISPR-Cas9 technology (or simply CRISPR) appeared only about ten years ago, but it has already managed to make a small revolution in genetic engineering and brought its creators the Nobel Prize. CRISPR allows you to manipulate genes with previously inaccessible accuracy, reliability and simplicity, becoming the most popular tool in this field. It is enough to inject a cocktail of proteins and nucleic acids into the cells of the embryo that has begun development to get a GM organism with new desired properties.
The technology has found the widest application, however, it turned out that it is not suitable for all types. In particular, the early embryos of many insects develop under a hard shell and are inaccessible to microinjections. Therefore, in such cases, scientists still have to rely on older, more complex and unreliable methods. Only recently, the staff of Kyoto University in Japan found an approach that allows using CRISPR for such animals. They write about this in an article published in the journal Cell Reports Methods (DIPA-CRISPR is a simple and accessible method for insect gene editing).
Yu Shirai and his colleagues injected the CRISPR cocktail not into embryos, but directly into the body cavity of adult fertile females. As a result of such manipulation, the system penetrates into the eggs of animals, making changes in their genomes that are inherited by developing offspring. The authors called the new approach DIPA-CRISPR (Direct Parental CRISPR) — "direct parental CRISPR".
General scheme of experiments with DIPA-CRISPR
To demonstrate the method in practice, scientists used CRISPR to "disable" in the embryos of red cockroaches (Blattella germanica) one of the genes that determines the color of their eyes. Experiments have shown that almost 22 percent of the offspring of such females carried an artificial mutation — a rather impressive figure for GM manipulations. Even more successful were the tests of the new approach on the beetles-khrushchaks Tribolium castaneum: the changes have already been preserved in half of their offspring. Slightly less effective were attempts at more complex modification of DNA — introducing a new gene into it.
"The successful application of DIPA-CRISPR for two evolutionarily distant insect species indicates its versatility," the scientists write in the article. "The simplicity and accessibility of DIPA—CRISPR will dramatically expand the possibilities of using gene technologies for a wide range of model and non-model insects, including pests and species of epidemiological importance, whose genome manipulation has not yet been performed." According to the authors of the study, the technology will allow working with more than 90 percent of insect species.
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