They are not super-corals genetically edited to repopulate the reef. However, the Acropora millepora described in PNAS last week are the first baby polyps ever CRISPRed in a lab, by a team involving Stanford University, UT-Austin and the Australian Institute of Marine Science in Townsville. These uncontroversial organisms pave the way for future experiments to reveal the molecular basis of vulnerability to bleaching, the fatal loss of algal symbionts triggered by global warming. Most corals reproduce once or twice a year, ejecting huge quantities of sex cells resembling underwater snowflakes. The time window of these spawning events can be predicted quite accurately, so researchers can sample the reef at the right moment and collect early embryos for genetic manipulation. We discussed the experiment results and future perspectives of gene editing in corals with the paper’s first author Phil Cleves.
CRISPR diving the coral reef
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Biodiversity is a wonderful interplay between genetics and evolution, and butterflies are a fascinating example with their variety of patterns and colors. Understanding how the same gene networks engender visual effects so diverse in thousands of Lepidoptera species is a longtime ambition for many entomologists and evolutionary biologists. The good news is that scientists nowadays have a straightforward technique working with organisms that were difficult to manipulate with conventional biotech tools. Obviously, we are talking about CRISPR. Two papers published in PNAS last week describe how genome editing was used to alter the genetic palette of colors in butterflies and how their wings changed as a result. We’ve asked the entomologist Alessio Vovlas, from the Polyxena association, to comment these stunning experiments. 