Abstract
The cotton pest, pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders)), is a significant pest in most cotton-growing areas around the world. In southwestern USA and northern Mexico, pink bollworm is the target of the sterile insect technique (SIT), which relies on the mass-release of sterile pink bollworm adults to over-flood the wild population and thereby reduce it over time. Sterile moths reared for release are currently marked with a dye provided in their larval diet. There are concerns, however, that this marker fails from time to time, leading to sterile moths being misidentified in monitoring traps as wild moths. This can lead to expensive reactionary releases of sterile moths. We have developed a genetically marked strain that is engineered to express a fluorescent protein, DsRed2, which is easily screened under a specialised microscope. In order to test this marker under field conditions, we placed wild-type and genetically marked moths on traps and placed them in field cages. The moths were then screened, in a double-blind fashion, for DsRed2 fluorescence at regular intervals to determine marker reliability over time. The marker was shown to be robust in very high temperatures and generally proved reliable for a week or longer. More importantly, genotyping of moths on traps by PCR screening of the moths was 100% correct. Our findings indicate that this strain - and fluorescent protein markers in general - could make a valuable contribution to SIT.
Highlights
The pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders)), originally native to Australia or Asia [1,2], is a globally important pest of cotton
In south-western USA and northern Mexico, this moth has been the target of the Pink Bollworm Eradication Program, an area-wide, international effort to eliminate the pest from cotton
We examined the robustness of the fluorescent protein marker in OX1138B, to assess its reliability on the sticky Delta traps used in the sterile insect technique (SIT) programme and how this changed over time under field conditions
Summary
The pink bollworm (Pectinophora gossypiella (Saunders)), originally native to Australia or Asia [1,2], is a globally important pest of cotton. In south-western USA and northern Mexico, this moth has been the target of the Pink Bollworm Eradication Program, an area-wide, international effort to eliminate the pest from cotton (and its minor hosts). The sterile insect technique (SIT) [3] is a critical component of the PBW Eradication Program (http:// www.cotton.org/tech/pest/bollworm/index.cfm). In pink bollworm SIT, the insect is mass-reared, marked internally by dye, sterilised with radiation and mass-released by air over cotton fields to find and mate with their wild counterparts. SIT has been valuable in the San Joaquin Valley in California, where it prevented establishment of pink bollworm for over 40 years [6]
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