| Alfred Handler |
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USDA, ARS, CMAVE
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Dr. Handler is a Research Geneticist (Insects), a position he has held since 1985. During his tenure with ARS, he has made numerous fundamental contributions to understanding and manipulating the genes of tephritid fruit flies, a group of invasive pests of great agricultural importance both in terms crop loss and the erection of trade barriers. He, along with visiting students and post-doctoral associates in his laboratory were among the pioneers of genetic transfer in fruit flies.
Following studies of P element vector transferability in related species of drosophilids, he utilized the piggyBac transposon to transform pest tephritids including the Caribbean fruit fly (Anastrepha suspensa), Mediterranean fruit fly (Ceratitis capitata) and oriental fruit fly (Bactrocera dorsalis). He has since proposed and tested new female-specific and uni-sexual conditional autocidal techniques that promise to eliminate females early in development for males-only strains and to replace irradiation of these males for sterility, that can seriously degrade the sexual performance of insects destined for SIT mass-releases
More recently, Dr. Handler has turned his attention to eliminating the possibility of inadvertent horizontal transfer of exotic transgenes into non-target, populations and species. This danger has been a principal obstacle to the more widespread use of genetically modified insects in biologically-based control programs and its removal could contribute to a genetic-transformation renaissance in the field of entomology. He and colleagues have received a patent for a novel method of targeting transgene insertions to specific genomic positions and immobilizing them for genomic stability ("Systems for gene targeting and producing stable genomic transgene insertions").
Dr. Handler will continue with studies underlying the production of conditional autocidal strains. He will create new piggyBac vectors, and newly discovered hopper transposon vectors, with new fluorescent protein markers and conditional lethal constructs. He plans to initiate germline transformation and CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing experiments, and conduct fitness and reproductive competitiveness studies for genetically marked insects. He will perform molecular analysis of conditional lethal transgenic strains, initiate phenotypic analysis and perform risk assessment for environmental impact statements. He will be particularly interested in additional molecular constructs that limit horizontal transfers in nature. This work will ultimately result in both new genetic tools for pest control, and also make their adoption by control programs more likely by providing a high degree of environmental safety.
Projects, Publications, & Patents
No projects listed for this employee.
No publications listed for this employee.
Patents
Handler, A.M. U.S. Patent Number 7,129,083. piggyBac Transformation System. October, 2006.
Horn, C. and Handler, A.M. U.S. Patent Number 7,700,356. System for gene targeting and producing stable genomic transgene insertions. April, 2010.
