Plant Insecticidal Toxins in Ecological Networks

Plant Insecticidal Toxins in Ecological Networks

Plant secondary metabolites play a key role in plant-insect interactions, whether constitutive or induced, C- or N-based. Anti-herbivore defences against insects can act as repellents, deterrents, growth inhibitors or cause direct mortality. In turn, insects have evolved a variety of strategies to act against plant toxins, e.g., avoidance, excretion, sequestration and degradation of the toxin, ...

Proteolytic stability of insecticidal toxins expressed in recombinant bacilli.

The production of the vegetative mosquitocidal toxin Mtx1 from Bacillus sphaericus was redirected to the sporulation phase by replacement of its weak, native promoter with the strong sporulation promoter of the bin genes. Recombinant bacilli developed toxicity during early sporulation, but this declined rapidly in later stages, indicating the proteolytic instability of the toxin. Inhibition stu...

Expressed in Recombinant Bacilli Proteolytic Stability of Insecticidal Toxins

Natural Toxins in Plant Foodstuffs

Since food plants are mixtures of large numbers of chemical compounds and since any substance is toxic in a high enough dose, it is not surprising that natural food plants are toxic under certain conditions. Toxicity from common natural foods has resulted from long-term consumption of a single food item or from short periods of consumption of foods containing unusually high levels of a toxic su...

Evolution of Bacillus thuringiensis Cry toxins insecticidal activity

Insecticidal Cry proteins produced by Bacillus thuringiensis are use worldwide in transgenic crops for efficient pest control. Among the family of Cry toxins, the three domain Cry family is the better characterized regarding their natural evolution leading to a large number of Cry proteins with similar structure, mode of action but different insect specificity. Also, this group is the better ch...