Kandul, N.P., Liu, J., Hsu, A.D., Hay, B.A., Akbari, O.S. (2020). A drug-inducible sex-separation technique for insects. Nat. Commun. 11(1): 2106.
FlyBase ID
FBrf0245511
Publication Type
Research paper
Abstract
Here, we describe a drug-inducible genetic system for insect sex-separation that demonstrates proof-of-principle for positive sex selection in D. melanogaster. The system exploits the toxicity of commonly used broad-spectrum antibiotics geneticin and puromycin to kill the non-rescued sex. Sex-specific rescue is achieved by inserting sex-specific introns into the coding sequences of antibiotic-resistance genes. When raised on geneticin-supplemented food, the sex-sorter line establishes 100% positive selection for female progeny, while the food supplemented with puromycin positively selects 100% male progeny. Since the described system exploits conserved sex-specific splicing mechanisms and reagents, it has the potential to be adaptable to other insect species of medical and agricultural importance.
