20-Hydroxyecdysone (20E) and juvenile hormone (JH) control a variety of physiological events during insect development and metamorphosis. To understand how 20E and JH developmentally regulate energy metabolism in insects, we performed a genome-wide microarray analysis of fat body tissues isolated from the silkworm, Bombyx mori. Many genes involved in energy metabolism, including genes in the gl...

The Bombyx mori hemolymph contains up to 16 chymotrypsin inhibitors (CIs). The present in vitro culture of tissues in Grace's medium indicated that CI-8, which belongs to the largest molecular-size group of CIs with sugar moiety, is synthesized in the fat body and secreted from it during the feeding period. When the fat body from other strain which synthesizes an allelic component (CI-7) instea...

Heterosis is a concern to all breeders, but the mechanism of heterosis remains unknown. In F1 organisms, genetic material is inherited from the two parents and theoretically, heterosis might be caused by differences in gene expression or modification. Differential gene expression was analyzed in hybrids and parents in Bombyx mori. The results showed that there were significant changes in gene e...

Autophagy, which is well conserved from yeast to mammals, plays essential roles in development and diseases. Using the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, as a model insect, several reports on autophagy have been made recently. Autophagic features are observed in the midgut and fat body during the larval-pupal transition as well as the silk gland and ovarian nurse cells during the pupal stage. ...

A cDNA encoding an IkappaB family protein was identified and the full nucleotide sequence was determined in the silkworm Bombyx mori. The IkappaB gene, designated BmCactus, was constitutively expressed mainly in the fat body and hemocytes. Transfection experiments on a B. mori cell line, NIAS-Bm-aff3, with expression vectors containing BmCactus, BmRelA, BmRelB, or the active portion of BmRelish...

A quarter of a century has passed since bombyxin, the first insulin-like peptide identified in insects, was discovered in the silkmoth Bombyx mori. During these years, bombyxin has been studied for its structure, genes, distribution, hemolymph titers, secretion control, as well as physiological functions, thereby stimulating a wide range of studies on insulin-like peptides in other insects. Mor...

Calorie restriction (CR) is known to extend life span from yeast to mammals. To gain an insight into the effects of CR on growth and development of the silkworm Bombyx mori at protein level, we employed comparative proteomic approach to investigate proteomic differences of hemolymph and fat body of the silkworm larvae subjected to CR. Thirty-nine differentially expressed proteins were identifie...

Calreticulin is a 46-kDa chaperone protein with multifunction, mainly involved in directing proper conformation of proteins, controlling calcium level, and participating in immune responses. In previous study, calreticulin from Bombyx mori (BmCRT) was identified, and BmCRT was significantly induced by some stimuli of intracellular calcium disturbance. In this study, we report that BmCRT mRNA an...

One way that aerobic biological systems counteract the generation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) is with superoxide dismutase proteins SOD1 and SOD2 that metabolize superoxide radicals to molecular oxygen and hydrogen peroxide or scavenge oxygen radicals produced by the extensive oxidation-reduction and electron-transport reactions that occur in mitochondria. We characterized SOD1 and SOD2 of...

In the silkworm (Bombyx mori), resistance to the Zhenjiang (China) strain of the densonucleosis virus (DNV-Z) is controlled by the recessive gene nsd-Z (non-susceptible to DNV-Z), which is linked to 7 simple-sequence repeat markers. Marker-assisted evaluation and selection of DNV-Z-resistant silkworms were used for predicting DNV-resistance in backcrossed animals. A silkworm race was bred using...