Developing gene editing technologies in the non-mammalian infectious disease model organism, Galleria mellonella

This award aims to produce transgenic Galleria mellonella larvae using CRISPR/Cas9 replacing some studies using transgenic vertebrates.

Galleria possess a number of advantages over other model systems used to study infections, including being able to be infected and maintained at 37^oC allowing experiments to be performed at the same temperature as human infections. Based on current scientific thinking, Galleria are not considered capable of suffering and therefore provide a partial replacement for the use of other animals. However, wider uptake of Galleria is dependent on methods to create transgenic Galleria as studies are currently limited to qualitative analysis of infection progression. During his PhD, Dr James Pearce developed the first transgenic Galleria larva strains enabling genome editing using CRISPR/Cas9. James will now expand on these methods to increase the number of genetic tools available to study Galleria increasing the number of studies Galleria can be used as a replacement tool.