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Demonstrating the potential of a novel spider venom based biopesticide for target-specific control of the small hive beetle, a serious pest of the European honey bee

Powell, M.E.; Bradish, H.M.; Cao, M.; Makinson, R.; Brown, A.P.; Gatehouse, J.A.; Fitches, E.C.

Demonstrating the potential of a novel spider venom based biopesticide for target-specific control of the small hive beetle, a serious pest of the European honey bee Thumbnail


Authors

M.E. Powell

H.M. Bradish

M. Cao

R. Makinson

A.P. Brown

J.A. Gatehouse



Abstract

The parasitic small hive beetle (Aethina tumida) feeds on pollen, honey and brood of the European honey bee (Apis mellifera); establishment in North America and Australia has resulted in severe economic damage to the apiculture industry. We report potential for the “in hive” use of a novel biopesticide that is toxic to this invasive beetle pest but harmless to honey bees. Constructs encoding the spider venom neurotoxin ω-hexatoxin-Hv1a (Hv1a) linked to the N- or C-terminus of snowdrop lectin (GNA) were used to produce recombinant Hv1a/GNA and GNA/Hv1a fusion proteins. Both were similarly toxic to beetles by injection (respective LD50 s 1.5 and 0.9 nmoles/g larvae) whereas no effects on adult honey bee survival were observed at injection doses of > 200 nmoles/g insect. When fed to A. tumida larvae, GNA/Hv1a was significantly more effective than Hv1a/GNA (LC50 s of 0.52 and 1.14 mg/ml diet, respectively) whereas both proteins were similarly toxic to adults. Results suggested that the reduced efficacy of Hv1a/GNA against larvae was attributable to differences in the susceptibility of the fusion proteins to cleavage by gut serine proteases. In laboratory assays A. tumida larval survival was significantly reduced when brood, inoculated with eggs, was treated with GNA/Hv1a.

Citation

Powell, M., Bradish, H., Cao, M., Makinson, R., Brown, A., Gatehouse, J., & Fitches, E. (2020). Demonstrating the potential of a novel spider venom based biopesticide for target-specific control of the small hive beetle, a serious pest of the European honey bee. Journal of Pest Science, 93(1), 391-402. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10340-019-01143-3

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Jul 26, 2019
Online Publication Date Aug 3, 2019
Publication Date Jan 31, 2020
Deposit Date Jul 30, 2019
Publicly Available Date Aug 8, 2019
Journal Journal of Pest Science
Print ISSN 1612-4758
Electronic ISSN 1612-4766
Publisher Springer
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 93
Issue 1
Pages 391-402
DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s10340-019-01143-3

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Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Copyright Statement
Advance online version © The Author(s) 2019. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.





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