RE: Gene Drive and the Engineering of Extinction – Part I
Great post :)
I've studied genetics and genomics a lot but never heard of this concept.
“Selfish” genes are thus able to induce their own propagation from one chromosome of the pair to both by damaging the chromosome that does not contain the gene and presenting themselves as the template to repair the break. The interesting thing with this mechanism is that selfish genes can thus change their probability of transmission to the offspring from 50% to 100% by artificially changing from heterozygote to homozygote at each generation until they are present in the whole population.
This is a really interesting concept, I wonder if this is related to the roughly 98% of our genome that's non-coding :/
Also seems like a good way for endegenous retrovirsuses to lie dormant, multiply and the destroy us all :'(