{"id":115562,"date":"2020-11-07T04:52:37","date_gmt":"2020-11-07T12:52:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/female-to-male-sex-conversion-in-ceratitis-capitata"},"modified":"2020-11-07T04:52:37","modified_gmt":"2020-11-07T12:52:37","slug":"female-to-male-sex-conversion-in-ceratitis-capitata","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2020\/11\/female-to-male-sex-conversion-in-ceratitis-capitata","title":{"rendered":"Female-to-male sex conversion in Ceratitis capitata"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/female-to-male-sex-conversion-in-ceratitis-capitata.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is based on the mass release of sterilized male insects to reduce the pest population size via infertile mating. Critical for all SIT programs is a conditional sexing strain to enable the cost-effective production of male-only populations. Compared to current female-elimination strategies based on killing or sex sorting, generating male-only offspring via sex conversion would be economically beneficial by doubling the male output. Temperature-sensitive mutations known from the <i><i>D. melanogaster<\/i> <i><i>transformer<\/i>-2<\/i><\/i> gene (<i>tra2<\/i><sup><i>ts<\/i><\/sup>) induce sex conversion at restrictive temperatures, while regular breeding of mutant strains is possible at permissive temperatures. Since <i>tra2<\/i> is a conserved sex determination gene in many Diptera, including the major agricultural pest <i>Ceratitis capitata<\/i>, it is a promising candidate for the creation of a conditional sex conversion strategy in this Tephritid. Here, CRISPR\/Cas9 homology-directed repair was used to induce the <i><i>D. melanogaster<\/i>-<\/i>specific <i>tra2<\/i><sup><i>ts<\/i><\/sup> SNPs in <i>Cctra2<\/i>. 100% female to male conversion was successfully achieved in flies homozygous for the <i>tra2<\/i><sup><i>ts2<\/i><\/sup> mutation. However, it was not possible, to identify a permissive temperature for the mutation allowing the rearing of a <i>tra2<\/i><sup><i>ts2<\/i><\/sup> homozygous line, as lowering the temperature below 18.5 \u00b0C interferes with regular breeding of the flies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Sterile Insect Technique (SIT) is based on the mass release of sterilized male insects to reduce the pest population size via infertile mating. Critical for all SIT programs is a conditional sexing strain to enable the cost-effective production of male-only populations. Compared to current female-elimination strategies based on killing or sex sorting, generating male-only [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,1506,412,1901],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-115562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-food","category-genetics","category-sex"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=115562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/115562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=115562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=115562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=115562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}