Gene drives meet germline biology

I’ve written previously about gene drive technology, which allows gene editing of entire species. This works by engineering alleles that are inherited at greater than the expected Mendelian frequency of 50%. One example is a CRISPR gene introduced into mosquitoes that copies itself to all offspring, while making only the female offspring sterile. This results in an increase in the proportion of males, shortly followed by a population crash.I wrote “Gene drives: why the wait?” nearly four years a...