Information management for entomology screening.

The successful introduction of genetically modified (GM) crops has created a revolutionary transformation of the agricultural industry with GM crops currently planted on some 130 million acres. Historically, agricultural companies were involved in the discovery of conventional insecticide chemistries in processes that were very similar to those in the pharmaceutical industry. With the introduction of GM technologies, the process has radically changed. The new process is best described as the pharmaceutical equivalent of a very large-scale limited clinical trial conducted at the discovery stage. For example, unlike pharmaceutical screens, GM crop discovery screens frequently involve live insects challenged with complex protein containing soups. Furthermore, the nature of the potential avenues for discovery mandates that assay models also support protein engineering, proteomics, and genomics efforts. The range in sample demand ranges from ultra-low to high throughput. Finally, regulatory and good business stewardship demands that data integrity and tractability is in place, from discovery through varietal introduction, to manage the information generated in support of a commercialized GM plant variety. The authors describe their discovery workflow and detail how they have customized a commercially available database software package to achieve an optimum configuration for entomology screening.