Expression of Insectical Protease Inhibitors in Arizona Cotton

Insect damage impacts tremendously on the value of the Arizona cotton crop. As traditional pesticides become increasingly less useful, due to insect resistance and regulatory problems, new methods for insect control are needed. For these reasons, we engineered genes encoding protease inhibitors (PIs) from Manduca sexta (tobacco hornworm), for expression in cotton, with the hope that these inhibitors would have insecticidal activity. Transgenic plants containing PIs have been generated: 22 fertile lines of the duplicated 35S promoter anti-elastase, 4 fertile lines of the anti -chymotrypsin and 5 fertile lines of the anti -trypsin. Over 3,000 T-1 seeds have been collected and T-2 generation seeds are in production. Many crosses have been made into Delta Pine 16, 90 and 5415 respectively. No significant effect of the PIs on boll number or seed yield was observed. Insect tests have been conducted and the results indicate that plants expressing the protease inhibitors (PI's) have decreased emergence of whiteflies compared to control plants. We believe this research is a significant step towards a bio- pesticide producing Arizona cotton variety