Abstract
Virus infections of insects can easily stay undetected, neither showing typical signs of a disease, nor being lethal. Such a stable and most of the time covert infection with Phthorimaea operculella granulovirus (PhopGV) was detected in a Phthorimaea operculella laboratory colony, which originated from Italy (Phop-IT). This covert virus (named PhopGV-R) was isolated, purified and characterized at the genetic level by full genome sequencing. Furthermore, the insect colony Phop-IT was used to study the crowding effect, double infection with other PhopGV isolates (CR3 and GR1), and co-infection exclusion. An infection with a second homologous virus (PhopGV-CR3) activated the covert virus, while a co-infection with another virus isolate (PhopGV-GR1) led to its suppression. This study shows that stable virus infections can be common for insect populations and have an impact on population dynamics because they can suppress or enable co-infection with another virus isolate of the same species.
Highlights
Virus transmission can follow two different mechanisms
An overt virus outbreak can kill a large number of individuals of a population and may function as an infective source for other host insects, either from the same or another generation; or a virus infection does not result in the death of the infected individual and can be transmitted from the infected parental generation to their offspring [1]
The PCR results confirmed the phenotypical observation of a virus infection of the collected P. operculella larvae
Summary
Virus transmission can follow two different mechanisms. An overt virus outbreak can kill a large number of individuals of a population and may function as an infective source for other host insects, either from the same or another generation (horizontal transmission); or a virus infection does not result in the death of the infected individual and can be transmitted from the infected parental generation to their offspring (vertical transmission) [1]. One method to obtain new baculoviruses is to collect insects from field populations and rear them in the laboratory until a virus outbreak occurs This method has been successfully applied to isolate betabaculoviruses from various insects and environments, such as South-African strains of Phthorimaea operculella granulovirus (PhopGV-SA), Plutella xylostella granulovirus (PlxyGV-SA) and Cryptophlebia leucotreta granulovirus (CrleGV-SA) [16,17,18]. We characterized a new PhopGV isolated from a persistent covert infected laboratory rearing of P. operculella (Phop-IT) This infection was covert in most cases, which means that no virus-killed individuals were detected, but a potential for an active overt virus outbreak was present. They argue for a careful quality management when baculoviruses are produced as biological control agents under in vivo conditions
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