Baculoviruses are widely used both as protein expression vectors and as insect pest control agents. This video shows how lepidopteran larvae can be infected with polyhedra by droplet feeding and diet plug-based bioassays. This accompanying Springer Protocols section provides an overview of the baculovirus lifecycle and use of baculoviruses as insecticidal agents, including discussion of the pro...

Insect myosuppressins are a highly conserved sub-family of peptides which are primarily characterized by the ability to suppress contraction of visceral muscles in a variety of insect species. We have isolated a cDNA from the true armyworm, Pseudaletia unipuncta, that encodes a prohormone containing a peptide identical to ManducaFLRFamide. We have shown that this myosuppressin gene appears to b...

Syringolides are water-soluble, low-molecular-weight elicitors that trigger defense responses in soybean cultivars carrying the Rpg4 disease-resistance gene but not in rpg4 cultivars. 125I-syringolide 1 previously was shown to bind to a soluble protein(s) in extracts from soybean leaves. A 34-kDa protein that accounted for 125I-syringolide 1 binding activity was isolated with a syringolide affi...

The administration of baculoviruses to insects for bioassay purposes is carried out, in most cases, by contamination of food surfaces with a known amount of occlusion bodies (OBs). Sinceper os infection is the natural route of infection, occluded recombinant viruses containing crystal protein genes (cry1Ab and cry1Ac) from Bacillus thuringiensis were constructed for comparison with the baculovi...

The Baculovirus Expression Vector System (BEVS) is widely used to produce high amounts of recombinant proteins. Nevertheless, generating recombinant baculovirus in high quality is rather time-consuming and labor-intensive. Alternatively, virus-free expression in insect cells did not achieve similar expression levels for most proteins so far. The transactivation method is a promising approach fo...

BACKGROUND The Drosophila melanogaster gene CG11501 is up regulated after a septic injury and was proposed to act as a negative regulator of the JAK/STAT signaling pathway. Diedel, the CG11501 gene product, is a small protein of 115 residues with 10 cysteines. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS We have produced Diedel in Drosophila S2 cells as an extra cellular protein thanks to its own signal pe...

Mouse polyoma virus major coat protein (VP1) expressed from a recombinant baculovirus is efficiently transported to infected cell nuclei and assembles into protein nanospheres morphologically similar to natural capsids. The nanospheres readily combine with plasmid DNA to form a hybrid gene therapy agent known as virus-like particles (VLPs). To facilitate large-scale production of VLPs free from...

A set of 18 plasmid subclones of the Autographa californica nuclear polyhedrosis virus genome supports expression from a late viral promoter in transient expression assays (J. W. Todd, A. L. Passarelli, and L. K. Miller, J. Virol. 69:968-974, 1995). Using this set of plasmids, we have assigned a role for each of the 18 genes required for optimal late gene expression with respect to its involvem...

The Norwalk and Hawaii viruses are antigenically distinct members of the family Caliciviridae and are considered to be important etiologic agents of epidemic gastroenteritis, with most studies focusing on the role of Norwalk virus. To further investigate the importance of Hawaii virus, Hawaii virus-like particles (VLPs) were produced by expression of its capsid protein in the baculovirus system...

We propose a novel method for direct cloning of foreign genes into baculoviruses which avoids the use of bacterial transfer vectors. The foreign gene to be inserted is derived by PCR using appropriate primers each of which contains an additional 50 nt of baculovirus sequence for homologous recombination between the PCR-derived DNA and the baculovirus DNA, thus accomplishing insertion of the for...