Fig. 1

Schematic view of site-specific integration of transgenes into the Y chromosome of the Anopheles gambiae Y-attP strain. The Y-attP line carries the attP docking site and a 3xP3-RFP fluorescence marker transcription unit [60]. a The ΦC31 integrase, provided in the form of plasmid, catalyses the recombination reaction between the attP target sequence (orange) and attB donor sequence (blue) resulting in the site-specific integration of the transgenic construct onto the Y chromosome. After recombination, hybrid sites called attL and attR are generated, which are no longer recognised by the integrase thus conferring stability to the integration. b A Cas9 coupled with a gRNA (shown as the molecular scissors) induces a double-strand break (DSB) at the attP target site. A donor plasmid containing homologous regions upstream and downstream of the DSB site acts as a template for homology-directed repair. This results in the insertion of the transgenes of interest into the Y chromosome (Table 1; Haghighat-Khah RE et al., unpublished)