Speciation constrains the flow of genetic information between populations of sexually reproducing organisms. Gaining control over mechanisms of speciation would enable new strategies to manage wild populations of disease vectors, agricultural pests, and invasive species. Additionally, such control would provide safe biocontainment of transgenes and gene drives. Natural speciation can be driven by pre-zygotic barriers that prevent fertilization or by post-zygotic genetic incompatibilities that render the hybrid progeny inviable or sterile. Here we demonstrate a general approach to create engineered genetic incompatibilities (EGIs) in the model insect Drosophila melanogaster. Our system couples a dominant lethal transgene with a recessive resistance allele. EGI strains that are homozygous for both elements are fertile and fecund when they mate with similarly engineered strains, but incompatible with wild-type strains that lack resistant alleles. We show that EGI genotypes can be tuned to cause hybrid lethality at different developmental life-stages. Further, we demonstrate that multiple orthogonal EGI strains of D. melanogaster can be engineered to be mutually incompatible with wild-type and with each other. Our approach to create EGI organisms is simple, robust, and functional in multiple sexually reproducing organisms.

中文翻译：

---

工程化昆虫中多种物种的遗传不相容性

物种形成限制了有性生殖生物种群之间遗传信息的流动。对物种形成机制的控制将使新的战略能够管理疾病媒介，农业病虫害和入侵物种的野生种群。另外，这样的控制将提供转基因和基因驱动的安全生物控制。自然形成可以由防止受精的合子前屏障或合子后遗传不相容性驱动，从而使杂种后代无法生存或不育。在这里，我们演示了一种在模型昆虫果蝇（Drosophila melanogaster）中创建工程遗传不相容性（EGI）的通用方法。。我们的系统将显性致死转基因与隐性抗性等位基因偶联。当与相似工程改造的菌株交配时，这两种元素都是纯合的EGI菌株可育且繁殖力强，但与缺乏抗性等位基因的野生型菌株不兼容。我们表明，EGI基因型可以调整为在不同的发展生命阶段引起混合杀伤力。此外，我们证明了D. melanogaster的多个正交EGI菌株可以被设计为与野生型以及彼此不相容。我们创建EGI生物的方法简单，可靠且在多种有性繁殖生物中起作用。