The Mosquito That Breaks Mendel's Law

[00:00:00]You think inheritance means a coin flip.

[00:00:02]This mosquito passes all. It's called a CRISPR gene drive, and it turns inheritance into a copy [music] machine.

[00:00:09]Watch it break Mendel's law. In 2015, Valentino Gantz, [music] Ethan Bier, and colleagues designed a drive for Anopheles stephensi malaria mosquitoes with glowing eye markers, and it copied itself. For you, that coin flip is why siblings look different.

[00:00:25]This drive deletes the flip. CRISPR cuts the matching chromosome, and the cell repairs it using the drive as a template. So, nearly every offspring inherits it. In small sealed lab cages, some engineered drives have swept through mosquito populations in roughly 10 generations. No engineered gene drive has been approved for wild release. Yet, the coin flip you were promised isn't universal.