Parental effects of Bt toxin and vitamin A on Helicoverpa armigera.

The increase in the area cultivated with vitamin-enriched transgenic crops producing Bt toxin raises the question of whether the addition of vitamins will in any way mitigates the effect of the toxin on the phytophagous insects that feed on those crops. On the other hand, the parental effect that feeding on these enriched transgenic crops may have on the offspring of the phytophagous that survive on them is not well known. In this work, the effect of vitamin A (β-carotene) addition to diets with or without Bt toxin on Helicoverpa armigera larvae and their offspring was determined.

Fitness Costs of Two Maize Lepidopteran Pests Fed on (Bt) Diets Enriched with Vitamins A and C.

Serious malnutrition problems occur in developing countries where people's diets are mainly based on staple crops. To alleviate this, high-production crops are being developed that are better adapted to climate change, enriched in micronutrients and vitamins, or resistant to pests. In some cases, new varieties have been developed with several of the characteristics mentioned above, such as biofortified and pest-resistant crops.

Carotenoids moderate the effectiveness of a Bt gene against the European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis.

We assessed the effectiveness of a biofortified maize line (4BtxHC) which accumulates high levels of antioxidant carotenoids that also expressed the insecticidal Cry1Ac Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) gene against the European corn borer Ostrinia nubilalis. This line had been previously engineered to accumulate carotenoids specifically in the seed endosperm, whereas the Bt gene was expressed constitutively. The concentrations of Bt toxin (Cry 1Ac) in the leaves of the 4Bt and 4BtxHC lines were not significantly different at 47±6 μg/g of fresh weight (FW); neither were they in the kernels of both lines (35±3 μg/g FW).

A carotenogenic mini-pathway introduced into white corn does not affect development or agronomic performance.

High-carotenoid corn (Carolight®) has been developed as a vehicle to deliver pro-vitamin A in the diet and thus address vitamin A deficiency in at-risk populations in developing countries. Like any other novel crop, the performance of Carolight® must be tested in different environments to ensure that optimal yields and productivity are maintained, particularly in this case to ensure that the engineered metabolic pathway does not attract a yield penalty. Here we compared the performance of Carolight® with its near isogenic white corn inbred parental line under greenhouse and field conditions, and monitored the stability of the introduced trait.

Freedom-to-operate analysis of a transgenic multivitamin corn variety.

In this article, we explore the intellectual property (IP) landscape relevant to the production and commercialization of Carolight(™) , a transgenic multivitamin corn variety created on humanitarian grounds to address micronutrient deficiencies in low-and-middle-income countries. The successful production of this variety requires IP rights risk management because there is a strong protection on inventions and processes via patent portfolios in both developing and industrialized countries. The IP framework is complex, and specialist patent lawyers are usually employed to perform such analysis, but the costs cannot always be met by small, publicly funded projects.