Biotech Updates

Scientists Discover Genetic Basis of Pest Resistance to Biotech Cotton

May 21, 2014

An international team of researchers led by University of Arizona (UA) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) unveiled the molecular basis in insects that evolved resistance to biotech cotton plants. The results of the study are published in PLOS ONE on May 19.

"Many mechanisms of resistance to Bt proteins have been proposed and studied in the lab, but this is the first analysis of the molecular genetic basis of severe pest resistance to a Bt crop in the field," said Bruce Tabashnik, one of the authors of the study and the head of the Department of Entomology in the UA College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.

The researchers compared cadherin gene in the pink bollworms from Arizona and India. They found an astounding diversity of cadherin in pink bollworms from India caused by alternative splicing, a novel mechanism of resistance that allows a single DNA sequence to code for many variants of a protein. This is the first report of alternative splicing linked with field-evolved Bt resistance.

Read more information at http://uanews.org/story/scientists-discover-genetic-basis-of-pest-resistance-to-biotech-cotton. Read the research article at http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0097900.