Spotlight on Genetic Design in a Spotted Wing Crop Killer.

Humans and insects have a love–hate relationship. Insects provide important ecosystem services in aquatic and terrestrial environments. However, they negatively impact human society through their role as disease vectors, agricultural pests, and invasive species. Finding the right balance between protecting the beneficial impacts and mitigating the negative impacts is challenging. Our current relationship with insects is tenuous. Insects remain the deadliest animals on the planet, with vector-borne diseases such as malaria, dengue, and zika responsible for more than one million deaths per year. Agricultural pests are responsible for destroying 5–20% of global grain crops annually, and this is expected to increase by a further 10–25% with each degree Celsius of global warming. Moreover, beneficial insects are dying off at unprecedented rates due to things such as global warming, habitat destruction, and widespread use of chemical pesticides. We are in the midst of an alarming decline in insect abundance worldwide, losing an estimated 1–2% of insect biomass annually. Genetically engineered (GE) insects are likely to have an important role alongside other control strategies in future integrated pest management plans. There are a growing number of strategies for genetic biocontrol, wherein a pest organism is essentially converted into a pesticide. GE biocontrol agents can be released to mate with their wild counterparts to decrease the population directly through hybrid lethality or to introduce genes that will ultimately decrease local pest populations. Such technologies have already been field tested in several countries to combat mosquitoes that vector disease. Laboratory proof-of-concepts are being developed for an array of agricultural pests as well as invasive species. Future opportunities to use genetic engineering to protect beneficial insect populations from the deleterious effects of climate change or habitat loss are also possible. Realizing the full potential of insect biotechnology for environmental applications requires that scientists and engineers break away from model laboratory organisms and into diverse organisms around the tree of life. This is happening for many areas of biotechnology. In industrial biomanufacturing, companies and research groups are moving away from the comfortable hosts such as Escherichia coli and baker’s yeast in favor of microbes with novel metabolic capabilities or environmental tolerances. In plant biotechnology, tools validated in model monocot and dicots need to be translated to crop species to realize their larger impact. Moving from model to non-model species is not a trivial undertaking. The species needs to be domesticated to the point that it can be reared in the lab through its entire life cycle. The mortality rate at each life stage needs to be sufficiently low so that early-stage transgenic embryos (which are usually generated with an efficiency of <10% for non-model organisms) are not lost through stochastic mortality before they can be outcrossed to generate a stable line. The myriad tools available for model species—reporter gene constructs, balancer chromosomes, genetic markers with easily scored phenotypes, and transgenic lines bearing chromosomal integration sites—do not exist. Without these tools, more time and resources need to be spent validating and tracking edited chromosomes than are spent on the actual editing process. In theory, groups seeking to branch out into non-model species can accelerate the domestication process by which these tools are created using the recent advances in genetic engineering. This is akin to building the airplane while you are flying it, and a great example is highlighted in this issue of The CRISPR Journal. A collaborative team comprising researchers from UC San Diego and North Carolina State University build and