How the insect pathogen bacteria Bacillus thuringiensis and Xenorhabdus/Photorhabdus occupy their hosts

Metabolic interdependence of obligate intracellular bacteria and their insect hosts.

Mutualistic associations of obligate intracellular bacteria and insects have attracted much interest in the past few years due to the evolutionary consequences for their genome structure. However, much less attention has been paid to the metabolic ramifications for these endosymbiotic microorganisms, which have to compete with but also to adapt to another metabolism--that of the host cell. This...

Is the Insect World Overcoming the Efficacy of Bacillus thuringiensis?

The use of chemical pesticides revolutionized agriculture with the introduction of DDT (Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) as the first modern chemical insecticide. However, the effectiveness of DDT and other synthetic pesticides, together with their low cost and ease of use, have led to the generation of undesirable side effects, such as pollution of water and food sources, harm to non-target or...

Differentiation of Bacillus anthracis , Bacillus cereus , Bacillus 1 thuringiensis based on csaB gene reflect their hosts ’ source

4 Jinshui Zheng, Donghai Peng, Xiaoling Song, Lifang Ruan, Jacques Mahillon and 5 Ming Sun 6 7 8 State Key Laboratory of Agricultural Microbiology, College of Life Science and 9 Technology, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070, China, and 10 Laboratoty of Food and Environmental Microbiology, Université catholique de 11 Louvain, B-11348 Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium. 12 13 14 *Correspondin...

Continuous evolution of Bacillus thuringiensis toxins overcomes insect resistance

The expression of insecticidal proteins from B. thuringiensis (Bt toxins) in crops has proved to be a valuable strategy for agricultural pest management1. Bt-toxin-producing crops have been widely adopted in agriculture with substantial economic and environmental benefits2, and have increased global agricultural productivity by an estimated US$78 billion from 1996 to 2013 (ref. 3). Unfortunatel...

Response: Evolution of Insect Resistance to Bacillus thuringiensis--Transformed Plants.