A Nigerian Scientist, Dr. Rose Gidado has advised Nigerian policymakers and farmers to embrace the technology of gene drive-based pest control strategy to boost bumper harvest and food security.

Gidado, Deputy Director at the National Biotechnology Development Agency (NABDA) and Country Coordinator, of the Open Forum on Agricultural Biotechnology (OFAB), said this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Monday.

She said Nigerian farmers needed to embrace the application of gene drive technology to their seeds and food crops in order to achieve food security that would translate to national development.

“Gene drives are systems that warrant biased inheritance by improving the possibility of DNA sequence passing from one generation to the other via sexual reproduction and potentially throughout an entire population.

“It is a modern biotechnology technique that alters the tendency of transmitting a specific allele from the natural 50 percent probability by propagating a particular set of genes throughout a population,’’ Gidado said.

Gidado said that the application of gene drive in Nigeria’s agricultural system would greatly help in the control of deadly insect pests that damage crops and consequently cause a reduction in food production.

Explaining in scientific terms, she said the gene drive element was made up of Cas9 nuclease guide, guide RNA, and an edited repair template for the integration of a new gene at the cut site.

Gidado said: “The CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive system works at the molecular level by cutting the wild type form of a gene and promoting the repair of the cell.’’

She said CRISPR-Cas9 does this by copying the homologous form of the gene which contains the gene drive to the damaged version.

Accordingly, the scientist said these results in the transformation of the heterozygote carriers of a gene drive into homozygotes that are eventually passed on to all progenies.

She maintained that the cycle of transformation of the progenies into homozygotes keeps on occurring until the gene drive spreads throughout the population.

“In agriculture, the application of CRISPR-Cas9 gene drive to weed control has been validated as very useful and efficient,’’ she said.

Gidado said that plant-sucking insects in the order of Hemiptera were some of the most devastating ones in Nigeria’s farms.

She argued that the negative effects of these destructive crop pests resulted from the stress and damage caused by feeding in addition to the plant pathogens they transmitted while probing plant tissue.

Shedding more light on the destructiveness of more insect pests, the scientist said several studies had shown that the Cas9-mediated gene drive technology was cheaper and easily affordable for efficient Nigerian scientists to explore.

“The application of the gene drive technologies has many more controls over several other devastating insects in Nigeria.

”It would be very necessary to adapt it to rescue our ailing food crop industry from the attack of destructive pests,’’ Gidado said.