1) Moth Trapping. Despite the use of Bt-transgenic cotton on over 98% of the acreage in Tennessee, bollworm and tobacco budworm still compose an important pest complex. Bollworms may cause significant economic damage to Bt cotton fields, and the bollworm/budworm can be even more damaging to non-Bt cotton. More importantly, the threat of tobacco budworm infestations results in high adoption of B...

The idea of enhanced methanol production from cell wall by pectin methyl esterase enzymes (PME) combined with expression cry genes Bacillus thuringiensis as a strategy to improve insect pest control in cotton is presented. We constructed cassette containing two (cry1Fa and Cry32Aa) pme genes, one Arabidopsis thaliana (AtPME), other Aspergillus. niger (AnPME) pCAMBIA1301 plant vector using CAMV-...

The adoption of transgenic Bt cotton has, in some cases, led to environmental and economic benefits through reduced insecticide use. However, the distribution of these benefits and associated risks among cotton growers and cotton-growing regions has been uneven due in part to outbreaks of non-target or secondary pests, thereby requiring the continued use of synthetic insecticides. In the southe...

In India, the area under transgenic crop cultivation has witnessed a phenomenal growth from 1.3 million hectares in 2005 to 3.8 million hectares in 2006, which is an increase of about 300 % in a year period (James 2006). Till March 2005, a total of 20 Bt-transgenic cotton hybrids have been released for commercial cultivation in northern, western and southern regions of India (Sharma et al. 2006...

Long-term growth of genetically modified plants (GMPs) has raised concerns regarding their ecological effects. Here, FLX-pyrosequencing of region I (18S) and region II (ITS1, 5.8S, and ITS2) rDNA was used to characterize fungal communities in soil samples after 10-year monoculture of one representative transgenic cotton line (TC-10) and 15-year plantation of various transgenic cotton cultivars ...

Cotton (Gossypium spp.) is an economically important crop that is grown throughout the world. It is the main material in textile and the main economic resource for more than 100 millions of cotton farmers in China. Due to its main role in our economy, cotton biotechnology has been significantly improved in the last decades in China, which led to a significantly progress both in cotton research ...

Drought and salinity are two major limiting factors in crop productivity. One way to reduce crop loss caused by drought and salinity is to increase the solute concentration in the vacuoles of plant cells. The accumulation of sodium ions inside the vacuoles provides a 2-fold advantage: (i) reducing the toxic levels of sodium in cytosol; and (ii) increasing the vacuolar osmotic potential with the...

Insect pest complex, cotton leaf curl disease and weeds pose major threat to crop production worldwide, including Pakistan. To address these problems, in the present study a triple gene construct harboring Cry1Ac, Cry2Ab, and EPSPS cassettes has been developed for plant specifically in cotton transformation against lepidopteron insect-pests and weeds. Nicotiana benthamiana (tobacco) was used as...

RAV (related to ABI3/VP1) protein containing an AP2 domain in the N-terminal region and a B3 domain in the C-terminal region, which belongs to AP2 transcription factor family, is unique in higher plants. In this study, a gene (GhRAV1) encoding a RAV protein of 357 amino acids was identified in cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). Transient expression analysis of the eGFP:GhRAV1 fusion genes in tobacco ...