Author Archives: mjscott3

Dispatch on sex determination and dosage compensation

In the current issue of Current Biology, Max has written a dispatch on the importance of finding that the femaleless (fle) gene is essential for development and dosage compensation inhibition in females in the malaria vector, Anopheles gambiae. In the … Continue reading

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Recent publications on screwworm and sheep blowfly male-only strains

We recently published two papers in a special issue of BMC Genetics on the sterile insect technique. One paper led by Carolina Concha and Ying Yang describes New World screwworm strains that carry an early female lethal conditional genetic system. In … Continue reading

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Publications on blow fly male-only strains and olfaction

As we continue to optimize genetic systems for male-only strains, we recently reported that selecting driver and effector transgenes with moderate levels of expression could be an effective strategy to obtain strains with good productivity. Ying Yan was first author … Continue reading

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Screwworm genome paper published

Our paper on developmental gene expression and assembly of the genome of the New World screwworm fly was published today in Communications Biology. It was a great collaborative effort involving scientists from the USDA-ARS, U. of Cincinnati, U. New Mexico, … Continue reading

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Welcome Aki, Alexis, Sarah and Nick!

Four people have joined the lab over the past year. Dr. Aki Yamamoto has for many years studied Drosophila melanogaster genetics. He is working on D. suzukii projects, including male-only strains. Alexis Kriete and  Sarah Hudadoff recently completed the first year of … Continue reading

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Self-Limiting Gene Drive Published

Our paper on a simple killer-rescue gene drive has been published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The experimental was done by Sophia Webster, a former PhD student in the lab and the modeling by Michael Vella, a … Continue reading

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Genetic Variation and Potential for Resistance to the tTA Overexpression Lethal System Published

We previously developed a female-specific tTA overexpression system for L. cuprina and C. hominivorax. We found that in some lines females with one copy of the transgene showed high survival but all females died with two copies. This suggested that … Continue reading

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Improved Lucilia cuprina sexing strains published

We describe improved transgenic embryonic sexing strains for the Australian sheep blowfly in a recent article in Molecular Genetics and Genomics . We found that promoters from the L. cuprina nullo or Cochliomyia macellaria CG14427 genes drove high levels of tTA expression in the … Continue reading

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CRISPR in blowflies published

Our paper on gene editing in screwworm and blowflies has been published in G3. We describe our efforts to optimize CRISPR/Cas9-based gene editing through targeting the brown body gene, which is an ortholog of Drosophila yellow. We then use the … Continue reading

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no blokes paper published in Current Biology

Our manuscript showing that the no blokes gene is essential for male viability and X chromosome gene expression in the Australian sheep blowfly has been published in Current Biology. The paper can be freely accessed for the next month using … Continue reading

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