Baculoviruses are increasingly being used as safe and effective biological control against several of the most devastating caterpillar pests worldwide. The active form of this biopesticide are occlusion bodies (OB), which protect viruses from the environment via a polyhedron matrix. Increasing OB yields per cell in culture is the main challenge to enable commercialization of invitro production of baculovirus pesticides. Understanding how insects respond to a baculovirus infection globally will guide engineering approaches to increase OB yields by manipulation of host cell genes.

This project studies the Helicoverpa amigera virus and Helicoverpa zea insect cell culture system in an attempt to optimize OB production. We were one of the first to successfully assemble an eukaryotic transcriptome using Illumina Next Generation Sequencing 100 bp paired-end reads without a reference genome sequence. As a result, the first comprehensive transcript sequence database for H.zea was generated, and is ready to be used for designing microarray chips, which compare high vs. low OB producers. Two platforms for microarray analysis have been developed. Firstly, monoclonal insect cells were isolated from an original heterogeneous cell culture. A high throughput and automated clone selection process was developed for insect cells to create and screen over 100 H.zea clones for virus yields. Secondly,a convenient platform that allows the traditional complicated manipulation of the baculovirus genome in insect cells to be done in a convenient E.coli system is being constructed for knocking out or knocking in virus or host genes important for OB production.