Creation of a new Drosophila melanogaster X chromosome balancer, First Multiple 8 ( FM8 ), using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system

Savannah Muron; Steve Kucera; Brian Oliver; Leif Benner

doi:10.17912/micropub.biology.000663

Creation of a new Drosophila melanogaster X chromosome balancer, First Multiple 8 ( FM8 ), using the CRISPR/Cas9 gene-editing system

MicroPubl Biol. 2022 Nov 10:2022:10.17912/micropub.biology.000663. doi: 10.17912/micropub.biology.000663. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Savannah Muron¹, Steve Kucera², Brian Oliver¹, Leif Benner^{1

3}

Affiliations

¹ Section of Developmental Genomics, Laboratory of Biochemistry and Genetics, National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD, USA.
² Department of Biology, The University of Tampa, Tampa, FL, USA.
³ Department of Biology, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, USA.

Abstract

Balancer chromosomes contain multiple inversions that work to suppress crossing over and prevent recovery of most recombinant chromosomes, allowing for alleles to be kept long-term without selection. These balancers are incredible tools, but some alleles within larger inverted segments are still lost to rare double crossover events between the balanced and balancer chromosomes. This study details a new methodology of producing balancer chromosomes using CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology to create new inversions within the largest segment of the common X chromosome balancer, FM7c. We were able to create a new X chromosome balancer, FM8, and anticipate that this process can be used to not only create other balancers in Drosophila melanogaster, but other model organisms as well.