Silkworm Pgenic System Was Successfully Constructed To Control Silkworm Sex And Improve The Quality Of Raw Silk.

Shortly before "P", the Huang Yongping research group of the Institute of plant physiology and ecology, Shanghai Institute of life sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences has successfully constructed a female specific lethal pgenic system of silkworm, which can improve the quality of silkworm and < a href= "http://www.91se91.com/news/index_f.asp" > raw silk < /a >.

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< p > silkworm is a representative insect of lepidopteran insects, and also an important economic insect.

Compared with female silkworms, male silkworms have stronger constitution and are more likely to feed. They also eat less mulberry leaves and higher conversion rate of leaf silk. In addition, male silk has fine fineness and good cleanliness, which is suitable for reeling high grade raw silk.

Therefore, breeding male silkworms is an important goal of sericulture production.

In recent years, advances in genetic manipulation technology including Bombyx mori, including pgenic technology, have provided the possibility of new breeding through molecular biology.

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< p > Huang Yongping research team, in collaboration with the British Oxitec company and the sericultural Institute of Zhejiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, has constructed a pgenic silkworm pgenic system which can express the pcriptional activator protein (tTAV) in a href= "http://www.91se91.com/news/index_s.asp" > female silkworm < /a > by using the sex specific alternative splicing mechanism of tetracycline Tet-off regulatory system and the bisexual gene (doublesex) derived from a lepidopteran insect pink bollworm.

In this system, the expression of toxic protein tTAV as an effector factor is controlled by tetracycline switch and sex switch. If added tetracycline in feed, the expression of tTAV is inhibited by tetracycline, and both female and male silkworms can develop normally. If there is no tetracycline in feed, the accumulation of tTAV in female can lead to death at embryonic stage or early stage of larva. However, because of the regulation of sex specific alternative splicing mechanism in male, there is still no tTAV expression, and the development is not affected, thus achieving the purpose of male silkworm breeding.

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< p > genetic manipulation technology can be used for genetic pformation of < a > silkworm < /a >, which can breed new varieties in a short time and improve the quality of Bombyx mori and even raw silk. At the same time, the results obtained from silkworm can also be used for genetic control of lepidopteran pests that account for 70%~80% of agricultural and forestry pests.

The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Ministry of science and technology.

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