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On the Trail from DNA to Protein, Chasing the Butterfly Virus
Nucleopolyhedrovirus (NPV), which belongs to Baculoviridae, is a rod-shaped, double-stranded circular DNA virus which infects arthropods, mostly insects. NPVs are highly species-specific, and make unique crystalline polyhedral structure made of polyhedrin protein. The NPVs do not replicate in mammalian cells, are safe to human, and can be observed the viral replication with conventional compound microscope, plus the availability of susceptible insect cell lines, therefore, the NPVs became an ideal model system to study basic virology.
Also, NPVs became popular because of its applications for baculovirus expression vector system (BEVS). A foreign gene will be cloned into a shuttle vector, and introduced to the NPV chromosome to make recombinant virus. This NPV will produce the protein in culture cells or host insects under the control of the strong polyhedrin promoter. So far, the commercially available BEVS has been widely used because of its high efficiency and eukaryotic characteristics, however, the hidden bottleneck is finding new useful genes which will maximize the capability of BEVS.
Since the human genome project, next generation sequencing technique (NGS) is getting useful in life science field along with the development of sequence analysis algorithms and increase of computational power. Especially, RNA-seq and de novo sequence assembly technics make discovery of new genes easier even in a non-model species with a proteomics approach, and these useful tools will be the key to catalyze the insect biotechnology.
