Chloroplast Engineering of Insect Resistance

Through plastid genome engineering, we have achieved agronomic transformation of many important crops, such as herbicide resistance, drought tolerance, salt tolerance, insect resistance, pathogen resistance, nitrogen fixation, nutrition, and cytoplasmic male sterility. Here, Lifeasible is committed to providing reliable and economical solutions for genetic engineering of chloroplast to enhance crop resistance to pests.

Introduction

Worldwide, approximately 500,000 herbivorous insect species continue to cause significant damage to crops. The use of a large number of chemical pesticides has led to limited environmental pollution. Humans are always looking for crops that can survive and produce in the presence of pests. Maintaining global food security requires the development of innovative, effective and environmentally friendly crop protection strategies. Chloroplasts serve as potential sites for "transplast" modification, which can effectively protect plants from herbivorous insects. With the advent of genetic engineering, insect resistance genes can now be transferred more quickly and discreetly into plant chloroplast genomes to increase their resistance to pests. The first application of transplastomic technology for pest control was the expression of the Bacillus thuringiensis cry1A(c) gene in tobacco chloroplasts, which encodes an insecticidal protein. In addition to tobacco, transgenic soybean and poplar plants expressing the cry gene also exhibit strong insecticidal activity.

Fig. 1. Expression of dsRNA in chloroplasts for RNAi-mediated insect pest control. (He G, 2022)

Our Solutions

The use of transgenic technology allows for the transfer of defensive compounds between species or to alter the control of existing defense systems in order to increase their effectiveness. Our engineers have been working hard to screen Bt strains with novel insecticidal activities. Furthermore, we attempted to genetically engineer these targets via the chloroplast for insect resistance. Our goal is to express Bt toxins in transgenic plants of specific crop varieties. To this end, we adopt the following strategies to achieve this goal.

(1) Construction of coding sequence for toxin synthesis.
(2) Selection of a suitable promoter for expression construction.
(3) Development of protocols for efficient transformation and regeneration of plant species.
(4) Production of homozygous progeny lines containing the transgene.

Attractive Advantages of Our Solutions

• Our solution enables the introduction of insecticidally active DNA sequences into crop plants to enhance their resistance to pests.
• Bt cotton and corn significantly reduce pesticide use and cause less damage to human health and the environment.
• Insect-resistant GM crops are in some ways more successful than earlier experiments have shown.
• We were able to achieve insecticidal protein concentrations 40,000 times higher than normal using chloroplast engineering.

Lifeasible's goal is to provide customers around the world with fully customized chloroplast engineered solutions for insect resistance. It should be pointed out that we only provide solutions for the development of insect resistance in crops, and do not produce insecticides that can be used directly. Please contact us to discuss further details to ensure your next success.

References

1. He G. (2022) Engineering chloroplasts for insect pest control[J]. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 119(22): e2205125119.
2. Talakayala A, Katta S, Garladinne M. (2020) Genetic engineering of crops for insect resistance: An overview[J]. Journal of biosciences. 45(1): 1-12.