The red imported fire ant (Solenopsis invicta) is a species of ant native to South America. The fire ant was inadvertently introduced into USA, Australia, New Zealand, and other Asian countries including China and Taiwan. Since the first report of the fire ant in port city of Busan, Korea in 2017, it was found in many other cities of Korea in following year. To obtain the molecular information of this invasive species, total RNA was extracted from the abdominal segment of the ants collected in Incheon, and subjected to transcriptome sequencing. By using Illumina sequencer platform, 101 base pared-end sequencing generated 2 × 50,064,081 of raw reads to obtain 2 × 45.95 Gbase of quality filtered nucleotide sequences. The in silico cDNA library was constructed by Trinity de novo assembler followed by TransDecoder ORF finder and CD-HIT clustering program to streamline the library. The final version of cDNA library contains 20,442 contigs with protein coding capability. To survey the virome of this ant, these contigs were searched against the viral reference sequences from NCBI RefSeq database with BLASTN program. As a result, contigs which showed high sequence identities with several RNA viruses including previously reported SINV-2 were found from the fire ant. This virome information might give an idea of a shift of virological environment of this newly found ant isolate or population in Korea.

소나무재선충병의 매개충인 북방수염하늘소의 체내 선충보유량에 따른 비행능력의 차이를 구명하기 위하여 춘천시 지내리의 잣나무림에서 어리소나무재선충(Bursaphelenchus mucronatus)에 감염이 확인된 북방수염하늘소 암·수 각 20마리를 채집, 실내사육 후 우화-섭식 1 주일이 지난 시점부터 1주 간격으로 Flight mill을 이용하여 비행실험을 진행하였다. 동시에 사육통 바닥에 여과지와 섭식한 잣나무 신초를 3~4일 마다 교체 후 Baermman funnel법으로 소나무 재선충을 분리하여 그 수를 조사, 비행능력과 선충보유량의 관계를 조사하였다. 그 결과 약 50,000마리 이상 선충을 체내에 보유시 비행능력이 급감하는 것을 확인 할 수 있었으나, 전체적으로 선충의 체내 보유량에 따른 비행능력의 차이는 상관관계가 없는 것으로 확인 되었다.

There are increasing interests in developing methods specifically detecting pathogenic Bursaphelenchus xylophilus. In order to develop a detecting method for B .xylophilus, at first we generated monoclonal antibodies (MAbs) specific to B. xylophilus, discriminating from other pine tree resident nematodes. Among 2304 hybridoma fusions screened. We finally selected a MAb clone, 9F10 and used for further study. To identify the antigenic target of MAb-9F10, we employed several biochemical methods such as SDS-PAGE, 2 dimensional electrophoresis, anion exchange chromatography, and immunoprecipitation to separate and isolate an antigenic target. Proteins from above methods were analyzed via nano-LC-ESI-Q-IT-MS. Peptides of GaLECtin were always detected from several proteomic analyses, suggesting that GaLECtin is the antigenic target of MAb-9F10.