Approaches to insect resistance using transgenic plants

Crops resistant to insect attack offer a different strategy of pest control to indiscriminate pesticide usage, which has undesirable effects on both the environment and humans. Transgenic plant technology can be a useful tool in producing resistant crops, by introducing entirely novel resistance genes into a plant species. Although most work in this area has focused on the use of genes encoding insecticidal Bacillus thuringiensis δ-endotoxins in transgenic plants, an alternative approach is to use plant genes which encode proteins with insecticidal properties. Protease inhibitors are involved in endogenous plant defence against insects. Over-expression of several inhibitors from constitutive promoters has been shown to afford protection in transgenic tobacco plants against attack by lepidopteran larvae. However, the degree of protection is not sufficiently high, and shows species- and inhibitor-specific effects. By assaying the interactions of protease inhibitors with insect gut proteases in vitro , the most effective inhibitor can be selected for a particular insect species. Data from bioassays of insects using artificial diets, and with transgenic plants, suggest that the in vitro assay of relative inhibitor effectiveness is consistent with the effects of different inhibitors on insect development and survival in vivo . Development of this techniology is considered. A different approach must be taken with sucking insect pests, as they do not rely on proteolysis for nutrition, and as Bt toxins effective against hom opterans have not been reported to date. Bioassay in artificial diet was used to identify plant proteins with insecticidal effects on the rice brown planthopper (a model homopteran). The lectin from snowdrop (GNA) was found to be the most effective of the proteins tested. GNA was shown to be present in the phloem sap of a transgenic tobacco plant transformed with a chimeric gene construct, containing the rice sucrose synthase-1 gene promoter and the GNA coding sequence, by immunoassay of honeydew produced by aphids feeding on it. GNA is also insecticidal to the aphid Myzus persicae , which will feed on tobacco, and thus a bioassay of transgenic tobacco, to ‘prove’ the technology, can be carried out. The effects of combining different resistance genes in the same transgenic plant to improve the effectiveness of protection are discussed, and exemplified.