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CrispR enabled Cane Toad on the menu soon...



A recent study posted the results of the first sequencing of the Cane Toad, Bufo Marinus.

The article is interesting as it posits that one thing that can come from this is the ability to devise biological methods to control this Toad which is an invasive species any where outside of it's native region in South America.

I found this interesting as the methods focused on involve various viruses that would be used to kill the toads in order to control their populations...but this is myopic thinking. In this age of rapidly advancing and accurate gene editing in the form of Crispr associated editing complexes we can do something far more than just make the Toads susceptible to a viral infection. In fact, thinking about the safety of this approach it leaves open the possibility that the virus modified to kill the toads could also have off species effects which could be very detrimental to those species where deployed.

Instead we should consider one of the main factors that lead to the hyper reproduction of this species, namely the poison that the toads secrete. This makes them essentially deadly to any predation and allows their numbers to explode in habitats that support their dietary needs...so a true solution to the problem could be had not by killing them with a modified virus designed to be good at killing them (and possibly by accident other things) but to focus on the genes that produce the poison and simply deleting them from the creatures.

This way the toads would be rendered no longer protected from predation and in fact bolster their status as a source of food to humans which currently comes with a bit of danger (one must be careful to remove the glands without contaminating the fleshy legs that one wants to eat) , cane toad legs could be quite the rage in the places where these creatures have thrived. One could imagine a weakness to this approach being that if one simply deletes the poison gene then one must ensure that all individuals in a population are deleted before allowing human harvesting of the toads for food....this would be needed IF one doesn't simply perform another edit to the toads dna such that it's color is changed when it doesn't have the poison gene...thus literally visually marking them as ready to eat and also having the benefit of determining where deployment of the editing vector (likely a virus modified to carry the deletion) should be concentrated (where the population of toads obviously have the unmodified coloring).

The promise of the revolution of efficient gene editing to me is in this soon to be facile ability to deploy edits to organism in a very highly targeted way ...not just to a species ...assuming use of specifies specific vectors but also to specific regions within those species to effect desired changes that change their impact in the ecosystem in a global manner that has little to zero off species effects.

Papers:

Viruses that may be useful to control Cane Toad found

Viruses useful to cane toad control

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