Heliothis zea nudivirus-1 (HzNV-1) is an insect virus previously known as Hz-1 baculovirus. One of its major early genes, hhi1, is responsible for the establishment of productive viral infection; another gene, pag1, which expresses a non-coding RNA, is the only viral transcript detectable during viral latency. Here we showed that this non-coding RNA was further processed into at least two disti...

Laboratory bioassays were conducted to determine the response of larvae of a susceptible strain of diamondback moth Plutella xylostella (L.) from the Rio Grande Valley of south Texas to five classes of insecticides. Test insecticides were permethrin, methamidophos, endosulfan, methomyl and Bacillus thuringiensis. Three monitoring techniques were developed and tested as methods of determining th...

Juvenile hormone esterase (JHE) plays an essential role in insect development. It is partially responsible for the clearance of juvenile hormone (JH) which regulates various aspects of insect development and reproduction. Because of its role in regulating JH titer, this enzyme has been targeted for development of biologically-based insecticides. JHE was partially purified from the beetle, Teneb...

Effective biological control of destructive heliothine larvae via application of microbial entomopathogens or parasitoids is limited by a robust immune response against infection and parasitization. To better understand the immune response of budworms against microbial entomopathogens, several orthologs of antibacterial response proteins were identified and extracted from a tobacco budworm, Hel...

© 2013. Published by The Company of Biologists Ltd 1 Address correspondence to: Dr. Stephen Foster 1 North Dakota State University 2 Entomology Department 3 NDSU Dept 7650 4 PO Box 6050 5 Fargo, ND 58108-6050 6 U.S.A 7 Ph. 1-701-231-6444 8 Fax 1-701-231-8557 9 Email: [email protected] 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Increased allocation of adult-acquired carbohydrate to 20 egg production re...

Insect cell lines have been widely used in recombinant baculovirus expression systems and transient gene expression studies. Critical to these applications have been the transfection of foreign DNA. This has been frequently done using labor intensive and cytotoxic liposome-based transfection reagents. In the current study we have optimized a new kind of polyethylenimine-based DNA transfection r...