Safety upgrade found for gene-editing technique

A genome-editing method that could allow researchers to rapidly engineer entire populations has had an important upgrade. A US team has added safeguards to reduce the chances that such ‘gene drives’ will escape the laboratory, and found a way to erase the genetic mutations after they have spread.

Gene drives hold the potential to wipe out insect-borne diseases and can speed up some genetic studies in the laboratory. But if released into the wild –  whether intentionally or not – gene drives could irrevocably scar entire ecosystems.

The safeguards, published today in Nature Biotechnology, may calm some fears about the technology. One of the techniques provides a way of genetically separating the components that fuel a gene drive, so that the engineered mutation will not spread as rapidly through a population. Another is a molecular 'undo' button: sending a second gene drive out to undo the effects of the first.

“We have a responsibility to keep our experiments confined to the laboratory,” says Kevin Esvelt, an evolutionary engineer at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, and an author of the paper.

So he and his colleagues decided to develop safety measures using the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. The organism is easy to work with in the laboratory and unlikely to spread a gene drive into wild populations because of its infrequent sexual reproduction.

Among the safety measures that they engineered was a ‘split drive’ in which the components of the gene drive are genetically separate. They also tested the ability of a second gene drive to undo the effects of a first — acting as a 'molecular eraser' to undo the genetic changes caused by the first gene drive.