Investigation on the Potential Environmental Hazards of Pesticidal Viruses. 1. Molecular Biology of 'Spodoptera frugiperda' Nuclear Polyhedrosis Virsus. 2. Lack of Evidence for Possible Environmental Hazards

摘要

Due to the environmental and ecological effects of toxic chemical pesticides, the usage of insect viruses have been considered as one of the alternatives for the control of agriculture insect pests. In fact in the past 3 decades, several baculoviruses have been used as viral pesticides for pest control. It has not been demonstrated to be hazardous to non-target organisms using the classical infectivity and morphological alteration as measuring factors. In this research project, the authors have further used molecular biological approaches to characterize the molecular structure of one of the insect viruses to investigate and elucidate the possible pathogenicity and oncogenicity of pesticidal viruses to human and other mammals at in vitro level. The authors' study suggests that the pesticidal virus Spodoptera Frugiperda (SF) can not productively infect human fibroblast or HEP-2 cell lines and can not induce morphological transformation of human fibroblast.