Crispr Gene-Drive Technologies For Urban Population Engineering

By surpassing the 50% inheritance limit of Mendel’s law of gene segregation, CRISPR-based gene drives have the potential to fight urban vector-borne diseases or suppress urban pests, but contemporary gene drives can spread unchecked and lack an analog output that modulates inheritance between 50–100%. We describe a generalizable and containable gene drive system in Drosophila with an analog output fine-tuned using an engineered Cas9 and a synthetic, orally-available small molecule.