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Synthetic species made to shun sex with wild organisms

Engineered organisms that cannot breed with wild counterparts could prevent transgenic plants from spreading genes to unmodified crops and weeds, and battle pests.
  1. Ewen Callaway
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Maciej Maselko has made wild sex deadly — for genetically modified organisms. A synthetic biologist at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis—St Paul, Maselko and his colleagues have used gene-editing tools to create genetically modified yeasts that cannot breed successfully with their wild counterparts. In so doing, they say they have engineered synthetic species.

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Nature 553, 259-260 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-00625-1

Updates & Corrections

  • Correction 16 January 2018: An earlier version of this story implied that the work to create synthetic flies had been completed. In fact, that work is still in progress.

References

  1. Maselko, M., Heinsch, S. C., Chacón, J. M., Harcombe, W. R. & Smanski, M. J. Nature Commun. 8, 883 (2017).

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