Identification of plant compounds that disrupt the insect juvenile hormone receptor complex.

Insects impact human health through vector-borne diseases and cause major economic losses by damaging crops and stored agricultural products. Insect-specific growth regulators represent attractive control agents because of their safety to the environment and humans. We identified plant compounds that serve as juvenile hormone antagonists (PJHANs).

Bombyx mori nucleopolyhedrovirus bacmid enabling rapid generation of recombinant virus by in vitro transposition.

A novel recombinant bacmid, bEasyBm, that enables the easy and fast generation of pure recombinant baculovirus without any purification step was constructed. In bEasyBm, attR recombination sites were introduced to facilitate the generation of a recombinant viral genome by in vitro transposition. Moreover, the extracellular RNase gene from Bacillus amyloliquefaciens, barnase, was expressed under the control of the Cotesia plutellae bracovirus early promoter to negatively select against the nonrecombinant background.

Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus ORF11 is essential for budded-virus production and occlusion-derived-virus envelopment.

Unlabelled: ORF11 (ac11) of Autographa californica multiple nucleopolyhedrovirus (AcMNPV) is a highly conserved gene with unknown function. To determine the role of ac11 in the baculovirus life cycle, an ac11 knockout mutant of AcMNPV, Ac11KO, was constructed. Northern blot and 5' rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) analyses revealed that ac11 is an early gene in the life cycle.