# Profoundd archive — Epstein Files # Bates number: EFTA00591446 # Title: 1 The evolutionary dynamics of RNA-guided gene drives # Dataset: 9 # Pages: 15 # Images: 15 detected # Tags: epstein, doj, dataset-9, image-described # Source PDF: https://profoundd.com/epstein-docs/EFTA00591446/download # Doc viewer: https://profoundd.com/epstein-docs/EFTA00591446 # # Text below is what Profoundd has extracted from the source PDF. # 'ocr-enriched' tag means OCR was applied to scan-only pages. # Image descriptions are AI-generated factual captions (llava:13b). #---------------------------------------------------------------------- === SUMMARY === 1 The evolutionary dynamics of RNA-guided gene drives 2 Charleston Noble., Jason Olejarz., ..., George M. Church & Martin A. Nowak 3 The genetic manipulation of wild populations has been discussed as a solution to a number 4 of humanity's most pressing ecological and public health concerns, including the 5 eradication of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, the reversal of herbicide and pesticide 6 resistance in agriculture, and the control of destructive invasive speciesl'2. Enabled by the 7 === EXTRACTED TEXT === 1 The evolutionary dynamics of RNA-guided gene drives 2 Charleston Noble., Jason Olejarz., ..., George M. Church & Martin A. Nowak 3 The genetic manipulation of wild populations has been discussed as a solution to a number 4 of humanity's most pressing ecological and public health concerns, including the 5 eradication of insect-borne diseases such as malaria, the reversal of herbicide and pesticide 6 resistance in agriculture, and the control of destructive invasive speciesl'2. Enabled by the 7 recent CRISPR/Cas9 revolution in genome editing;, RNA-guided gene drives-selfish 8 genetic elements which can spread through wild populations even if they confer no 9 advantage to their host organism —are rapidly emerging as the most promising 10 approach2,4-10. Before this technology reaches real-world application, however, it is 11 imperative to develop a deep theoretical understanding of the potential long-term outcomes 12 of drive release in a wild population. Toward this aim, we here present the first 13 evolutionary dynamics study of RNA-guided gene drives. In particular, we show that drive 14 spread occurs along one of four distinct classes of trajectories —two of which are 15 counterintuitive and previously unreported —and we derive simple conditions based on 16 tunable design parameters which are sufficient to yield evolution toward a desired 17 outcome. Furthermore, our results imply a simple design for `threshold gene drives' which 18 spread only if released at a sufficiently high initial frequency, providing a practical 19 mechanism for localized containment of gene drive spread" l''. 20 Gene drives are selfish genetic elements which bias their own inheritance and spread 21 through populations in a super-Mendelian fashion (Fig. la). Various examples can be found in 22 nature, including transposons' 4, Medea elements 1s, and segregation distorters 16, but so-called These authors contributed equally to this work EFTA00591446 23 homing endonuclease gene drives have received the most significant attention in the literature. In 24 general, these function by converting drive-heterozygotes into homozygotes through a two-step 25 process: (1) the drive construct, encoding a sequence -specific endonuclease, induces a double- 26 strand break (DSB) at its own position on a homologous chromosome, and (2) subsequent DSB 27 repair by homologous recombination (HR) copies the drive into the break site (Fig. lb). Any 28 sequence adjacent to the endonuclease will be copied as well; if a gene is present we refer to it as 29 `cargo', as it is `driven' by the endonuclease through the population. 30 Though originally proposed over a decade agog, the chief technical difficulty of this 31 approach —inducing precisely targeted cutting—has only recently been overcome by the 32 discovery and development of the CRISPR/Cas9 system3'17. Briefly, Cas9 is an endonuclease 33 whose target site is prescribed by an independently expressed guide RNA (gRNA) via a 20- 34 nucleotide protospacer sequence. Due to the large space of possible 20-nucleotide sequences, 35 virtually any position in a genome can be uniquely targeted by Cas9, and thus so-called RNA- 36 guided gene drives can be constructed simply, requiring only the engineering of a suitable 37 Cas9/gRNA construct 2. 38 Previous studies have provided experimental proofs-of-concept for endonuclease gene 39 drives in small laboratory populations 4-738 or considered the population genetics of gene drives 40 under specific conditions" 9.2°, but none have explored the evolutionary dynamics of gene drives 41 in general. Of particular concern is the potential for emergence of drive resistance within a 42 population, which has not been studied in any depth previously. This can occur if non- 43 homologous end joining (NHEJ) is employed rather than HR in repairing a drive-induced 44 double-strand break; this pathway typically introduces a small insertion-deletion mutation at the 45 endonuclease target sequence, resulting in the creation of a drive-resistant allele rather than the EFTA00591447 46 desired duplication of the drive allele (Fig. lb). Far from an unlikely scenario, NHEJ is strongly 47 favored over HR in many organisms21-23. 48 To understand the potential behaviors of RNA-guided gene drives, we here consider a 49 genetics-based evolutionary dynamics model. In particular, we study the evolution of a 50 population of diploid organisms and focus on a specific locus which has three alleles, the wild- 51 type (A), the gene drive (D), and a drive-resistant allele (R) which is a loss-of-function variant of 52 the wild-type (Fig. lb). To abstract the cellular-level drive dynamics, we assume that the wild- 53 type allele in an AD heterozygote is converted to a drive allele with probability P or to a drive- 54 resistant allele with probability 1-P (Fig. lc). Both the drive and resistant alleles are immune to 55 targeting by the endonuclease and thus are not converted similarly. A simple biological 56 interpretation for P is the chance that double-strand break repair occurs by HR rather than NHEJ, 57 and this varies from as low as P-41.25 in mammalian cells23 to as high as P=.1 in yeasts 24. 58 To describe the population -level dynamics of gene drive spread, we assume that gene 59 drive release occurs in an infinite, randomly mating population with viability selection. For the 60 sake of simplicity, we assume that the drive confers a dominant fitness cost c on its host 61 organism, while the resistant allele confers a recessive cost s (Fig. 1d). We consider the former 62 justified by the high cutting efficiency of Cas9 paired with its potential for off-target cleavage3 63 and the latter by the relative rarity of dominant loss-of-function mutations 25. Note that both of 64 these parameters can be tuned when engineering gene drive systems: c can be increased either by 65 including a costly (dominant) cargo gene in the drive construct or by engineering purposeful off- 66 target cleavage, while s can be increased or decreased simply by choosing more- or less- 67 essential genes for targeting by the drive. EFTA00591448 68 Depending on these costs, gene drive release in a population results in one of four long- 69 term behaviors (Fig. 2). Each occurs in a distinct regime in parameter space, and these are 70 separated by simple, linear boundaries: sx and c=P/(1+P) (Fig. 2a and 2b). The former 71 intuitively divides the space based on whether the drive allele or resistant allele is more costly, 72 while the latter can roughly be thought of as the minimum cost for which the drive no longer 73 achieves super-Mendelian inheritance. To see this, consider an AD heterozygote. If D were to 74 follow standard Mendelian inheritance, then the next generation would inherit it with probability 75 Pm=1/2. If, instead, D were a gene drive as described above, then the next generation would 76 inherit it with probability PD.(1-c)(1+P)/2. Super-Mendelian inheritance then requires that 77 PO> PM, implying that (1-c)(1+P)> 1, or equivalently, c