Abstract
Invasive species are among the major driving forces behind biodiversity loss. Gene drive technology may offer a humane, efficient and cost-effective method of control. For safe and effective deployment it is vital that a gene drive is both self-limiting and can overcome evolutionary resistance. We present HD-ClvR in this modelling study, a novel combination of CRISPR-based gene drives that eliminates resistance and localises spread. As a case study, we model HD-ClvR in the grey squirrel (Sciurus carolinensis), which is an invasive pest in the UK and responsible for both biodiversity and economic losses. HD-ClvR combats resistance allele formation by combining a homing gene drive with a cleave-and-rescue gene drive. The inclusion of a self-limiting daisyfield gene drive allows for controllable localisation based on animal supplementation. We use both randomly mating and spatial models to simulate this strategy. Our findings show that HD-ClvR could effectively control a targeted grey squirrel population, with little risk to other populations. HD-ClvR offers an efficient, self-limiting and controllable gene drive for managing invasive pests.
Highlights
We show that in the spatial model, complete population suppression is achieved approximately 5 years later than in the randomly mating population model
We explored how the placement of supplemented animals could impact population suppression
Our results show that spatial dynamics of supplementation placement are not prohibitive to the spread of the gene drive, but that with an optimised strategy, spread at a rate equal to randomly mating population can be achieved
Summary
The first section details the randomly mating population model, and the second the spatial model. We adopted the work of Prowse et al.[16] and implemented new features. This model is an individual-based, stochastic, discrete-time model of a randomly mating population. We model the homing and subsequent inheritance of the gene drive. By running this stochastic model several times, we obtain an impression of the possible outcomes.
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